Senior Principal Engineer, Fastly
Infrastructure Engineering
$266.3-319.5k
If hired in Canada, the estimated salary range is CA$253,638 to CA$304,366
More information about location
Edge cloud platform
Job no longer available
Edge cloud platform
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$266.3-319.5k
If hired in Canada, the estimated salary range is CA$253,638 to CA$304,366
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build a better internet — a safe place where good can thrive.
Role
Who you are
- Proven ability to design & implement complex, reliable, and highly efficient systems. Most Senior Principal Engineers at Fastly have at least 12 years of domain relevant engineering experience
- Recent experience developing complex applications in C, C++, Rust, and/or Go, with an aptitude for learning new languages
- Experience leading development of new technologies that contribute to open source communities or setting standards through IETF, SVTA, or similar bodies
- A demonstrated positive collaboration with external vendors, partners, or customers on complex solutions
- Proven experience building systems that can be easily and reliability operated
- A leader who can balance the benefits from collaboration with the risks of “design by committee” or autocratic decision-making
- Experience operating business-critical systems with high uptime requirements
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts for varying audiences and produce clear and comprehensive documentation
- A collaborative mindset with experience working across cross-functional teams, fostering a culture of respect, knowledge sharing and innovation
- Proven ability to mentor and support the growth of engineers, both within a specific area of expertise and more broadly
Desirable
- Experience developing or maintaining orchestration software for large complex environments
- Understanding of security concerns in multi-tenant systems including QEMU
- Developed or supported in a zero-trust environment including secure boot, attestations
- Experience either developing or supporting Linux Kernel
- Knowledge of network protocols & functions: BGP, TCP, routing, transport
- Passion for modernizing software while ensuring continued functionality
What the job involves
- Senior Principal Engineer - Infrastructure Engineering
- Are you ready to define the architecture that keeps Fastly’s edge software performant, deployable, observable, and secure across every environment we operate
- Our Infrastructure Engineering organization is responsible for the systems that make this possible
- As a Senior Principal Engineer, you will set technical strategy, work with standard bodies and lead cross-functional initiatives that scale Fastly’s technology stack to support new partnerships with ISPs while upholding stringent reliability and security standards with minimal impact to performance
- As a key member of the Engineering Leadership team at Fastly, you will be hands-on in critical areas of the code and model the highest level of engineering excellence for members of the engineering team
- You will also act in concert with the greater network and edge industry to establish standards that grow the internet for new workloads and topologies
- Lead full lifecycle projects from architecture & design to deployment in support of Fastly’s edge systems
- Write, test, and deploy C, Rust, and Go code
- Maintain a broad understanding of how critical systems work together - your work will span everything from scaling our edge platform on different infrastructures, integrating the edge in a variety of environments and collaborating with the industry
- Design, evolve and implement critical systems and features with a focus on performance, resilience and scalability
- Anticipate where and when systems will need to be adapted to meet our growth needs
- Articulate technical strategy via design documents
- Sequence the technical building blocks required to enable durable innovation
- Guide, share knowledge, and lead teams toward implementing cross functional systems
- Enable outcome driven, collaborative discussions utilizing the deep technical knowledge of the teams you work with
- Mentor and support the professional growth of engineers, fostering a culture of respect, knowledge sharing, innovation, and collaboration within the team
- Lead by example
- Be an active implementer and team member
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to shape a clear technical roadmap - prioritizing key initiatives and proactively identifying and mitigating risks - to deploy, support, troubleshoot, and deliver features to customers
- Help guide and debug the organization to successfully implement the vision
- Partner with Sr Engineering leaders to build and execute in both internal & open source contexts
- Work Hours:
- This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as required for on-call rotation
Application process
- Posting Open Date: Aug. 15, 2025
- Anticipated Posting Close Date*: Sept. 15, 2025
- *Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants
Our take
Internet users around the world have come to expect personalized, real-time digital experiences, but delivering these quickly and securely, while maintaining quality, can be a difficult task for businesses.
Fastly enables the companies to deliver fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Its edge cloud platform moves data and applications closer to end-users — improving the user experience, putting the power back in developers’ hands, and enabling clients to focus on growing their businesses.
The company has helped several high-profile businesses, including Reddit, Pinterest, Stripe, EPIC Games, and more. Its offering is well-regarded in the space, demonstrated by it being named a 2022 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for Global CDN, as well as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Edge Development Platforms, Q4 2023 report.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jan 2019
$40m
SERIES F
Jul 2018
$40m
SERIES F
Total funding: $259m
Company benefits
- Parental support and beyond: We support our families by offering generous time off for parental leave. And beyond that, we work hard to build a culture that allows for all employees to have the life outside work that they desire year round.
- Health and wellness: Your well-being matters here. Our health plans offer a variety of options, including full medical, dental, and vision coverage, short- and long-term disability insurance, mental health resources, and more.
- Invest in your future: We offer 401(k)/retirement plans, employee stock purchasing plans (ESPP), and reimbursements for learning and development programs — so we can support your ongoing growth and success.
- Keep learning and growing: Helping people go further means nurturing their talent. Through annual reimbursements for employee learning activities, regular hangouts and advice from our Senior Staff, talks from industry leaders, and cultural events — we offer tons of opportunities for people to learn. And we’re always looking to grow as a company, too: we collect employee engagement and experience data annually and leverage our Employee Experience Champion Network to understand employee feedback, so we can keep improving.
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Kip Compton
(CEO)Kip joined the Fastly team in 2024 as CPO, becoming CEO in 2025. Prior to this, he was an SVP of Strategy & Business Development/Networking at Cisco.
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