Sr. Software Engineer - Core Platform (Hybrid)

As a global leader in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. We work on large scale distributed systems, processing almost 3 trillion events per day and this traffic is growing daily. Our customers span all industries, and they count on CrowdStrike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We're proud to work for a mission-driven company leveraging AI to transform the way we work. CrowdStrikers drive their careers through flexibility and autonomy while also being expected to contribute to a culture of responsible AI adoption, experimentation, and innovation. We use an AI-first mindset as a force multiplier to proactively and continuously accelerate execution, build expertise, uncover insights, and solve complex problems. We’re always looking to add talented CrowdStrikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters? The future of cybersecurity starts with you.

About the Role:

As a Senior Engineer (Typically equivalent to Staff or Sr Staff titles in other companies) in our Reliability team, you'll work directly within CrowdStrike product groups alongside product engineers and their leadership. You'll partner with engineering leaders to shape reliability roadmaps while doing hands-on work solving complex distributed systems problems at scale. This is hands-on systems engineering work focused on writing code, building foundational infrastructure, and solving complex problems rather than day-to-day operations or ticket management. While we embrace the SRE moniker, you'll find that it means something much more service-oriented at Crowdstrike, and affords you no shortage of Golang development initiatives, as well as the freedom to move up/down and laterally across the stack as & when needed. It is far and away our most self-driven & autonomous backend development role.

CrowdStrike Falcon processes trillions of events per day. You'll work on the critical production systems that power this platform by improving, rearchitecting, and scaling them to meet growing demands. You'll write production code, debug complex distributed systems issues, and tackle problems spanning scale and resiliency, performance engineering, foundational observability and instrumentation, cost optimization, and failure modeling.

Product engineers and engineering leaders will come to you for guidance on architectural decisions because you've earned credibility through hands-on work and delivering results. You'll ensure follow through on incident retrospectives with concrete improvements that eliminate entire classes of failures. You'll identify opportunities to extract common patterns into shared libraries or tools, or partner with platform teams on improvements that benefit multiple product groups. Recent examples from the team include resolving critical issues in leader election libraries and building infrastructure-as-code tools that eliminate manual deployment processes.

Why This Role Matters: CrowdStrike Falcon is the industry standard in cloud-native cybersecurity and threat hunting. Our customers depend on us to protect their businesses from sophisticated threats, and reliability isn't optional - it's fundamental to our mission. As an Embedded SRE, your work directly impacts whether organizations around the world can defend themselves against cyberattacks. You'll be working on problems that matter, at a scale that few companies can match, with the autonomy to make real architectural decisions.

This position requires candidates to work 2 to 3 days per week in one of our offices in Midtown Manhattan, NY; Redmond, WA; Sunnyvale, CA; or Austin, TX . It's a hybrid role, with employees typically working 2 to 3 days per week in the office, on average.

What You'll Do:

• Partner with engineering leadership across multiple product groups to define and drive multi‑year reliability roadmaps.
• Design and implement architectural improvements to services, libraries, and platforms that impact teams across all of CrowdStrike.
• Develop and maintain services that meet aggressive reliability and scalability demands.
• Extend and build new libraries for cross‑cutting concerns spanning CrowdStrike's cloud platform, which comprises hundreds of libraries and services.
• Lead initiatives around reliability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency in large‑scale distributed systems.
• Establish foundational observability practices: ensure teams instrument services properly, react to signals effectively, and leverage observability to drive automation such as continuous delivery.
• Define and implement service‑level objectives and error budgets that drive real decision‑making and prioritization.
• Lead performance and cost optimization efforts: profiling, bottleneck analysis, capacity planning, and cloud efficiency improvements.
• Conduct resilience engineering: chaos experiments, failure injection, failure modeling, and designing for graceful degradation.
• Design and implement automation and infrastructure‑as‑code to improve infrastructure reliability and eliminate manual toil.
• Provide technical leadership during complex incidents and ensure follow‑through on retrospectives with concrete improvements that eliminate entire classes of failures.
• Identify opportunities to extract common patterns into shared libraries and tools, or partner with platform teams on improvements benefiting multiple product groups.
• Continuously re‑evaluate our products to improve architecture, knowledge models, developer and user experience, performance, and stability.
• Drive strategic technical decisions and influence infrastructure and operational improvements across the organization.
• Mentor and coach engineers, raising the technical IQ of the team and driving architectural standards across the org.
• Use and give back to the open source community; evangelize software engineering best practices, especially as they pertain to Go.
• Brainstorm, define, and build collaboratively with members across multiple teams as an energetic self‑starter who owns and is accountable for deliverables.

What You'll Need:

• 10+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems and service‑oriented backends at scale.
• 5+ years developing microservices for a SaaS product in a modern backend language (Go, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Python, Node.js).
• Expert‑level proficiency in at least one programming language, with expert‑level Go or demonstrated ability and willingness to reach expert level in Go.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: consensus algorithms, replication, consistency models, failure modes, and scalability patterns.
• Proven experience scaling backend systems — sharding, partitioning, horizontal scaling, capacity planning, and performance optimization are second nature.
• Deep understanding of multi‑threading, concurrency, and parallel processing.
• Track record of making impactful architectural decisions at organizational scope and seeing them through to production.
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to influence without direct authority across organizational boundaries.
• Thorough command of engineering best practices: appropriate testing paradigms, effective peer code review, and resilient architecture.
• Ability to thrive in a fast‑paced, test‑driven, collaborative, and iterative environment; strong team‑player orientation.
• A desire to ship code and a love of seeing your bits run in production.
• Degree in Computer Science, or commensurate experience in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.

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