Staff Software Developer, Cloud Networking

About the team + role

The Cloud Networking team’s mission is to build scalable, secure, and reliable networking infrastructure that powers communication across all Robinhood services. We enable our engineering teams to build and operate microservices seamlessly by providing foundational networking capabilities that are resilient and transparent.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Platform Engineer to design, build, and evolve our foundational platform for large-scale services—focusing on AWS, Kubernetes (K8s) on Amazon EKS, modern networking, and a robust Istio service mesh to deliver secure, reliable, and performant systems. This role is part of the Network Service Discovery and Communication (SDC) team, responsible for service discovery, traffic management, and resilient service-to-service communication across our platform.

The role is located in the office location(s) listed on this job description which will align with our in-office working environment. Please connect with your recruiter for more information regarding our in-office philosophy and expectations.

What you’ll do

• Lead technical strategy and execution for platform networking, traffic management, and service-to-service communication across multi-tenant/multi-cluster EKS environments.
• Design and operate resilient service mesh topologies with Istio, including mTLS, traffic policies, ingress/egress, rate limiting, and observability, with Envoy-based extensions where appropriate.
• Define and implement platform standards for HTTP/REST and gRPC APIs, including versioning, contract governance, and performance/SLO baselines.
• Build automation, tooling, and paved roads in Python and Go (Golang) to improve developer productivity, operational safety, and release velocity.
• Create and maintain Terraform-based Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules, pipelines, and guardrails for secure, auditable, and scalable infrastructure changes.
• Partner with security, networking, and application teams to drive end-to-end solutions for identity, encryption, zero-downtime migrations, and incident readiness.
• Provide technical leadership: drive roadmaps, set success metrics, de-risk complex projects, communicate tradeoffs, and mentor senior engineers.

What you bring

• Experience with AWS network communication fundamentals (VPCs, subnets, routing, security groups, NLB/ALB, PrivateLink, NAT, DNS).
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes (K8s) and AWS EKS operations at scale (cluster lifecycle, node pools, autoscaling, admission control, CRDs).
• Strong understanding of HTTP/REST and gRPC protocol fundamentals, including performance, reliability, and backward compatibility.
• Strong understanding of Istio service mesh; Envoy experience is a strong plus.
• Exceptional traffic communication troubleshooting skills across L3–L7, including packet capture/analysis, Envoy/Istio telemetry, and debugging DNS/TLS/MTLS and routing policies.
• Strong scripting/programming skills in Python and Golang.
• Experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices.