Location:This is a hybrid role based out of our Austin, TX office and requires in-office presence three days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday).

Position Summary:

TrendAI is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to help buildTrend Vision One™ Private Access, our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) capability. Private Access lets enterprise customers reach internal applications — RDP, SSH, web — without exposing those apps to the public internet and without a traditional VPN.

The Austin team works across three pieces of Private Access: aConnector on-premises next to the customer's application; a Relay in our cloud that brokers the connection between the end user's device and the Connector; and a Controller of cloud microservices that runs the policy, identity, and authorization plane. The product runs across many global cloud regions to meet customer compliance and latency needs. This is a hands-on engineering role with architectural scope.

How We Build:

We're moving in the same direction as the rest of the industry: engineers no longer just write code; we design the systems that produce it. Concretely, we're building toward a daily loop where:

• Engineers work through an agent harness (Claude Code, plus its peers) layered on top of GitHub Actions, Jira, CI/CD, docs, and runtime data.

• Agents handle most of the inner development loop. Humans gate at the edges — architecture, end-to-end validation, the failures the agents can't resolve, and the question of what "good" actually means.

• Engineers design the pipeline; if the output is bad, we fix the assembly line.

We're partway through this transition and the candidate we hire will help define how much further it goes.

AI makes mistakes — confidently.A senior engineer's value shifts from typing code (AI does that) toward defining the right requirements, catching the plausible-but-wrong output, and bringing the context AI doesn't have. The skills that matter most:

• Systems thinking— catch failure modes (latency, cost, drift, silent failures) before they reach production.

• Operational instinct— when something looks off in production, reach for metrics, profiling, and autoscaling without waiting for an SRE.

• Critical review— design validation layers and catch the subtle thing that looks right but isn't.

• Security thinking— zero-trust is the product and the development model; reason about access control, data protection, and safe execution boundaries by default.

• Domain expertise— understand (or be ready to learn) our customers' environments, the problems they bring us, and the operational realities that aren't in any spec.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement features across the Connector, the Relay, and the Controller services that drive them.

• Own one or more Controller microservices end to end (rule engine, geolocation, event workers, proxy paths, connector management).

• Diagnose and resolve performance issues in production: memory pressure, CPU saturation, latency hotspots, autoscaling tuning.

• Write architecture proposals and design documents; drive them through review with peers and the team's architect.

• Investigate complex production support cases — the ones that require domain expertise about a customer's environment, an interop quirk, or proposing a different approach to their problem.

• Contribute to the team's AI-augmented development pipeline: shape what gets autonomous, where humans gate, and what validation is non-negotiable for a security product.

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience building production backend systems. Equally comfortable with Kubernetes-deployed services and software that ships as a Linux VM — our stack spans both.

• Strong proficiency in Go or an adjacent systems-leaning language (Rust, C++, or similar) and willingness to be polyglot in our stack (Go, Python, some C/C++).

• Demonstrated experience operating software that runs in customer environments — on-prem services, marketplace images, update mechanisms — and the realities of long-tail version compatibility (customers do not upgrade on your schedule).

• Hands-on production debugging with metrics, profiling, and autoscaling (HPA / KEDA).

• Linux internals (systemd, namespaces, networking) at a level sufficient to debug a misbehaving Connector running on a customer's host.

• Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, TLS, proxies, NAT, firewalls) — the Connector and Relay carry customer traffic directly.

• Demonstrated experience using an agent harness like ours in real engineering work, and the judgment to direct, review, and validate its output.

• Excellent written communication; ability to write design documents that survive review.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior work on a ZTNA, SASE, SSE, VPN, or other network security product.

• Distributed systems experience — consistency, retries, idempotency, and reasoning about partial failures across services and regions.

• Production depth inMicrosoft Azure (where our cloud services run). AWS and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) experience is a plus — the Relay also deploys to those clouds for regions where Azure isn't available.

• CI/CD and supply-chain hygiene: signed releases, SBOM, reproducible builds.

• Experience designing or operating an LLM-powered system in production (RAG, agentic workflows, or otherwise).

• Track record of driving architectural decisions across multiple services and lifting peers along the way.

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