Staff Engineer, Fastly
Monetization
More information about location
Edge cloud platform
Be an early applicant
Edge cloud platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build a better internet — a safe place where good can thrive.
Role
Who you are
- Hands-on experience designing and operating highly available, reliable data pipelines and distributed systems that process large volumes of data at scale - most Staff level engineers at Fastly have at least 7 years of related experience
- 5+ years building systems that collect, aggregate, and derive insights from large datasets. You've shipped a forecasting or reporting feature that real stakeholders depended on and you've had to explain why the numbers were wrong
- You drive projects, not just tasks. You've owned a multi-week effort end-to-end: design doc through post-launch
- You design for the people downstream of your data. The engineer whose service silently ingested bad records for a week, the customer who got an incorrect bill, the on-call engineer who had no idea what broke because there were no metrics on the pipeline. You've been the reason someone's numbers were wrong, and you've carried that into how you build now
- Testing and observability as subtraction, not addition. You can name a metric you added that paid off - and one you'd delete now
- Relational and non-relational storage systems (MySQL, BigTable, BigQuery, Dynamo, Cassandra) experience
- Pub/sub style message queues (NSQ, Kafka, Google Pub/Sub, Kinesis) experience
- Coding agents as a daily driver, not reluctantly. This team uses them heavily
Desirable
- Experience with billing or finance systems (e.g. recurring billing engines, ratings engines, financial forecasting tools) and their data requirements
- Expert on RESTful API design: resource modeling, versioning, idempotency, error semantics, pagination, OpenAPI. You've made one of these calls wrong in production and remember what it cost to clean up
- Go development
- Cloud Technologies
What the job involves
- As a Staff Software Engineer you will lead the design and development of highly-available, scalable systems as the platform expands to support new product lines, more complex pricing models, and a usage surface that keeps growing
- Design, ship, and own billing infrastructure, usage APIs, and backend services, from technical proposal and design docs through implementation, testing, production rollout, and on-call support
- Use AI coding agents as part of your daily workflow
- Take ambiguous or broadly-scoped problems and turn them into well-defined technical plans that the team can execute on
- Partner with a diverse set of stakeholders across engineering, product, business systems, and billing to align on requirements and deliver impactful solutions
- Develop design and architecture documents as a way of collaborating across groups in the design of new systems and APIs
- Evolve the tools and pipelines that power billing, usage reporting, and orderability for Fastly's growing product catalog
- Consider stability, performance, and scalability in your designs and in the guidance you provide to the team
- Mentor and grow other engineers on the team through code review, pairing, and technical leadership
- Participate in an on-call rotation
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 companies to deliver fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Its edge cloud platform moves data and applications closer to end-users and improves the user experience, putting the power back in developers’ hands. Ultimately, it enables clients to focus on growing their businesses rather than improving their customer experience.
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 its naming as a 2022 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for Global CDN, as well as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Edge Development Platforms 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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