Senior Software Engineer (Isolation/Sandboxing)
About Workato Workato delivers enterprise infrastructure for the agentic era, redefining iPaaS and helping enterprises unify data, applications, processes, and AI into a single, governed platform. A leader in Enterprise MCP and trusted by 50% of the Fortune 500, Workato’s cloud-native architecture connects every application, data source, and process to power real-time orchestration at scale. With enterprise-grade security and continuous innovation at its core, Workato provides the trusted foundation for organizations to automate with confidence and operationalize AI across the business. To learn more, visit www.workato.com Why join us? Ultimately, Workato believes in fostering a flexible, trust-oriented culture that empowers everyone to take full ownership of their roles. We are driven by innovation and looking for team players who want to actively build our company. But, we also believe in balancing productivity with self-care. That’s why we offer all of our employees a vibrant and dynamic work environment along with a multitude of benefits they can enjoy inside and outside of their work lives. If this sounds right up your alley, please submit an application. We look forward to getting to know you! Also, feel free to check out why: Business Insider named us an “enterprise startup to bet your career on” Forbes’ Cloud 100 recognized us as one of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world Deloitte Tech Fast 500 ranked us as the 17th fastest growing tech company in the Bay Area, and 96th in North America Quartz ranked us the #1 best company for remote workers We are looking for a Senior / Staff Software Engineer with a strong background in systems programming, Linux internals, performance optimization, and workload isolation. This is not a typical backend, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering role. We need someone who can work across multiple layers of the system stack, from Linux kernel mechanisms and networking to application-level services and security controls. The ideal candidate has experience designing, implementing, and optimizing complex systems where security, isolation, and performance are equally important. Ideal Background We are looking for engineers who have worked on one or more of: Linux kernel-adjacent systems Sandboxing and isolation platforms Container runtimes Hypervisors and virtualization Cloud infrastructure internals Performance engineering Operating systems Networking infrastructure Security-focused systems programming Examples include engineers who have contributed to: gVisor Kata Containers Firecracker containerd CRI-O KVM-based platforms Linux security frameworks Large-scale distributed infrastructure
Responsibilities
Building and improving secure workload isolation systems Designing and implementing sandboxing mechanisms for user-generated and AI-generated code execution Working with Linux security primitives such as: namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, permissions and access controls Profiling large distributed systems and identifying bottlenecks Improving networking performance and traffic management Designing and evolving internal protocols and service communication mechanisms Contributing to and debugging system-level services and infrastructure components Evaluating and integrating technologies such as: gVisor, KVM, container runtimes, virtualization technologies Driving technical projects from architecture and requirements gathering through implementation and production rollout Requirements 5+ years of industry experience Experience building and shipping large-scale, reliable, highly distributed systems Systems-level programming experience, especially in C, Go, Rust Expertise in L2, L3, and/or L4 networking protocols Good understanding of Linux networking and security Experience building on top of Linux kernel networking primitives – netfilter, nftables, eBPF, tc, network namespaces, etc Experience with large-scale distributed data pipelines, from data structuring to efficient querying to data analysis Experience of working with public cloud infrastructure providers (AWS/Azure/Google Cloud) Understanding of Kubernetes concepts Excellent debugging and optimization skills Understanding at the protocol level, including the differences between what the specs say, and what actually happens on the Internet Contributions to open source projects is a plus Excited by the idea of optimizing complex solutions to general problems Attention to detail and ability to solve complex customer problems Own solutions end-to-end and driving the design, development, and deployment process Able to work across teams and level common, sustainable solutions