Staff Engineer at CloudLinux

About CloudLinux

CloudLinux is a global, remote first company driven by its core principles: do the right thing, employees first, we are remote first, and we deliver high volume, low cost Linux infrastructure and security products that help companies increase the efficiency of their operations. Every team member supports one another and does what they can to ensure collective success.

About the Role

CloudLinux is currently hiring Staff Engineers for various projects within the Imunify360 product. Imunify360 is CloudLinux's multi layer security suite for Linux web servers, including antivirus and malware cleanup, WAF, IDS/IPS, Proactive Defense, patch management (KernelCare/Patchman), and IP/domain reputation. It runs on hundreds of thousands of shared, VPS and dedicated hosting servers under cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin and standalone environments.

The engineering organization consists of 60+ engineers in squads covering backend, core, server agent, malware research, WAF/WebShield, and Patchman. Core services are written in Python, while agents and performance critical paths use Go and Rust. The team runs on Hetzner and its own bare metal infrastructure.

Role Mission and Scope

Most complex technical challenges in Imunify360 go beyond individual squads. A single detection change can impact the scanner, agent, UI, reputation backend, and release process. While squad leads own delivery within their teams, the Staff Engineer ensures technical alignment across the product.

As a Staff Engineer, you will be a hands on technical leader working across the entire product, focusing on the most critical and high impact challenges as priorities evolve. You will drive technical decisions, improve architecture, establish engineering standards, and help teams build sustainable solutions.

This is an individual contributor role without direct people management responsibilities. You will remain actively involved in development, spending approximately 30 to 50% of your time writing production code rather than focusing solely on architectural design. While deep expertise in a particular area is valued, this role requires the flexibility to work across different components, collaborate with multiple squads, and tackle challenges wherever your expertise can make the greatest impact.

What You Will Own

Architecture and Technical Direction

• Own the end to end architecture of Imunify360 as a product: agent, server, and cloud backends, data flows, and the contracts between them.
• Write and drive ADRs and RFCs for cross squad changes. Run the Wednesday and Friday architecture sync together with the Technical Director.
• Keep a living tech debt and risk register (security, compliance, uptime) with owners and dates, and get the top items funded on the roadmap.

Hard Cross Cutting Problems

• Agent resource footprint on dense shared hosts: CPU, memory and I/O budgets for scanning, file monitoring (inotify/fanotify) and WAF, measured on real kernels rather than benchmarks from elsewhere.
• Detection pipeline quality: false positive and false negative rates, signature and ML model rollout with staged gates and rollback.
• Upgrade and release safety across a large, heterogeneous fleet (CentOS, AlmaLinux, CloudLinux, Ubuntu, multiple control panels, old kernels).
• Backend scale and cost of reputation, ThreatIntel and telemetry services.
• Migrating hot paths from Python to Go or Rust where the data shows it pays off, and saying no where it does not.

Engineering Standards

• Set the bar for design reviews, code review, testing strategy, observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry) and secure SDLC (OWASP ASVS, CIS Benchmarks as relevant).
• Lead or co lead SEV1 and SEV2 incidents when the cause is unclear or cross squad. Ensure the blameless post mortem ships within 24 hours and its actions get closed.
• Drive the AI augmented SDLC in practice: show what good agentic coding looks like (prompt specificity, context provision, review quality, tool boundaries) on real changes, not slides.

People Multiplier (No Direct Reports)

• Mentor senior engineers and squad leads toward staff level scope.
• Act as the technical bar raiser in hiring loops for senior and lead roles.
• Be the engineering voice in product and sales discussions: estimates, feasibility, and no dated customer commitment without a written squad lead estimate.

Key Milestones

• 30 days: Shipped at least one non trivial change to production. Can explain the full request path from agent to backend. Has a personal list of top 10 technical risks.
• 90 days: Owns one cross squad initiative with an approved ADR, a measured baseline, and a staged rollout plan. Published risk register reviewed in arch sync.
• 6 months: That initiative is in production with before and after metrics. At least one engineering standard (for example release gating, agent perf budget, design review template) is adopted by 3 or more squads.
• 12 months: Recognized by squad leads as the default escalation point for cross cutting technical decisions. At least one senior engineer grown into broader scope with your mentorship.

Requirements

Must Have

• 10+ years building and operating production software, with 3+ years in a Staff, Principal, or Tech Lead scope spanning several teams.
• Strong production experience in Python and at least one of Go or Rust.
• Deep Linux internals knowledge: processes, filesystems, networking, kernel interfaces (inotify/fanotify, eBPF or similar), packaging (RPM/DEB), systemd.
• Track record of designing and running distributed systems at scale: async backends, queues, databases, caching, failure modes.
• You have owned systems that run on customer machines (agents, daemons, on prem software) and know what upgrade safety, backward compatibility and resource budgets mean there.
• Security mindset: threat modeling, secure coding, handling of untrusted input (files, HTTP traffic, user content).
• Writes clear, short technical documents and drives decisions in async, remote teams across time zones.
• Uses AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude, MCP based tooling) daily and can judge their output critically.

Nice to Have

• Experience in server security: AV/malware detection, WAF (ModSecurity/Coraza), IDS/IPS, rootkit detection, CVE/patch management.
• Experience with WordPress and Node.js web application hosting at scale.
• ML in production for classification or detection, including evaluation and safe model rollout.
• Observability at scale: Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, ClickHouse or similar.
• CI/CD ownership: GitLab CI, Jenkins, build systems for multi distro packaging.
• Open source contributions in security or systems tooling.

Benefits

• Stay hands on technically while owning complex, high impact engineering work.
• Work on challenging Linux, automation, and cybersecurity problems across mature and newer products.
• Influence technical direction and make meaningful architectural decisions.
• Work independently with a high level of ownership and autonomy.
• Fully remote work with flexible working hours.
• 24 paid vacation days, 10 national holidays, and unlimited sick leave.
• Private medical insurance compensation.
• Co-working and gym/sports reimbursement.
• Education budget.
• Opportunity to receive a reward for innovative ideas that the company can patent.

By applying for this position, you consent to the processing of your personal data as described in the Privacy Policy, which provides detailed information on how your data is maintained and handled.