Senior Software Engineer - Backend (Rust)

In today's world, where data spreads across various clouds and devices, traditional security measures aren't enough. Businesses need a dynamic approach to defend against constant cyber threats and ensure agile data security. Fortanix leads the way in data-centric cybersecurity for hybrid multicloud environments, using advanced cryptography, encryption, and confidential AI solutions.  

As data breaches become more frequent and traditional defenses fall short, we focus on data exposure management to keep your information safe. Our unified data security platform addresses vulnerabilities in hybrid multicloud environments, defends against threats, and makes it easier to discover, assess, and fix data exposure risks. Whether implementing a Zero Trust model or preparing for the post-quantum computing era, we help businesses worldwide protect their most sensitive data, wherever it is. 

Our commitment to solving the world’s toughest data security challenges has earned Fortanix multiple Cybersecurity Excellence and Innovation Awards, as well as recognition from industry giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Intel, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. 

Our team includes industry leaders and cryptography experts, creating a culture of trust, innovation and collaboration where every voice is valued. Recognized as a Great Place to Work, we're looking for passionate individuals to help us shape the future of data security and work towards a safer digital future. 

Fortanix is looking for a Senior Software Engineer – Backend to help build and scale the backend services behind our Key Insight product.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys solving problems that don't always come with a predefined solution. You'll work on a growing cybersecurity product that integrates with cloud platforms, on-premises databases, certificate lifecycle management tools, and other enterprise systems to discover, analyze, and provide insights into cryptographic security.

Our backend is built in Rust, so production Rust experience is highly valuable. We're also open to strong backend engineers coming from C++ or Go who are interested in working deeply in Rust.

What you'll work on:

You'll own backend features from the initial product requirement through design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support.

A typical project might start with a request to integrate Key Insight with a new cloud provider or enterprise technology. Rather than simply receiving an implementation specification, you'll investigate the technology yourself: understand its APIs and SDKs, experiment with how they work, determine how our product should integrate with them, and recommend an approach to the team.

From there, you'll translate that research into a technical design, identify any architectural changes required, break the work into executable pieces, and implement the solution.

You'll also:

• Design and build backend services in Rust, including REST APIs, data models, database schemas, and service-to-service integrations.
• Build integrations with cloud and enterprise platforms, researching unfamiliar APIs, SDKs, services, and technologies when necessary.
• Own technical design for new capabilities, considering architecture, scalability, performance, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Scale a growing product. As adoption increases, you'll identify and solve performance bottlenecks, scalability challenges, and architectural limitations.
• Take features through production, including implementation, unit and integration testing, CI/CD, deployment, validation, performance testing, and production readiness.
• Debug complex production issues across application, integration, database, and infrastructure layers and make the changes necessary to resolve them.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to refine requirements, evaluate technical trade-offs, and turn product needs into well-designed engineering solutions.
• Support customers and internal teams when complex technical issues arise, helping diagnose problems and improve the product based on what we learn.
• Collaborate with engineers across a globally distributed team, participating in design reviews, code reviews, technical discussions, and architectural decisions.

We're looking first and foremost for a strong backend engineer.

You should have substantial hands-on experience building production backend systems and be comfortable owning complex engineering problems rather than working exclusively from detailed specifications.

Strong candidates will have experience with:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience in backend development.
• Strong hands-on programming experience in Rust, C++, or Go. Production Rust experience is preferred.
• Designing and building backend services and microservices used in production.
• Designing and implementing REST APIs, including API contracts, integrations, and service-to-service communication.
• Designing database schemas and data models and working with application data-access layers.
• Building or integrating with third-party APIs, SDKs, cloud services, or enterprise platforms.
• Taking ambiguous technical requirements, researching unfamiliar technologies, and turning findings into a practical technical design and implementation plan.
• Diagnosing and solving performance and scalability problems in production backend systems.
• Debugging complex issues across multiple components or services.
• Owning software through the full development lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, production validation, and ongoing support.
• Working effectively with Product Management and other engineering teams in a distributed environment.

Helpful, not required:

Experience with any of the following will help you ramp quickly:

• Production development in Rust
• Kubernetes, containers, or cloud-native deployment environments
• AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, or other cloud platforms
• Building products that integrate with multiple external systems or cloud providers
• Cybersecurity, cryptography, key management, certificate management, or observability products
• Experience working on a product during a high-growth or adoption phase, particularly where increasing usage created new performance or scalability challenges

What will make someone successful in this role:

The strongest engineer for this team isn't simply someone who knows Rust syntax.

We're looking for someone who can be given a problem and independently figure out how the technology works, evaluate the available APIs and SDKs, propose an architecture, build the integration, test it at scale, deploy it, and help troubleshoot it once customers begin using it.

If you enjoy that combination of research, backend architecture, hands-on coding, integrations, and production problem-solving, this role should give you substantial technical ownership.

• We offer a competitive salary and equity package
• 40 hours of Volunteer Time Off/year
• The opportunity to redefine cloud computing in a friendly, collaborative work environment.

Fortanix is an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace with equal opportunity for all applicants and teammates. Our goal is to recruit the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool regardless of race, color, religion, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other status. If you’re interested in working in a fast-growing, exciting working environment – we encourage you to apply !