Software Engineering Manager—Full Stack (Control Plane, Data Plane & UI)

The internet's evolution has progressed through distinct phases. Cisco became synonymous with the internet itself, providing the foundational infrastructure that enabled client-server architectures and established the backbone of global connectivity. Subsequently, API gateways and platforms like MuleSoft facilitated human-to-web commerce. We are now entering a phase defined by autonomous agent-to-agent communication, a fundamental shift towards interconnected intelligent systems.

Just as Cisco and API gateway technologies defined their respective eras, Tetrate is now defining the next generation of the internet. We are building the foundational platform that enables secure, scalable, and efficient communication between Large Language Models (LLMs) and autonomous agents. By architecting the control plane for these complex interactions, we are establishing the core infrastructure for the next phase of interconnected AI systems.

We're building the infrastructure that powers secure, resilient, and observable communication for modern applications—at global scale. Our service mesh platform, built atop Istio, Envoy, and Kubernetes, helps the world's largest enterprises enforce security, reduce operational complexity, and accelerate cloud-native adoption across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. We're backed by leading VCs and are proud contributors to the open-source ecosystem.

You'll lead a mission-critical team responsible for everything from policy and networking control APIs, to the high-performance data plane, to the developer-focused UI that ties it all together. The systems you build will secure and manage thousands of services and workloads in production environments—spanning multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and zero-trust topologies. This is an opportunity to own the end-to-end developer and operator experience in a deeply technical platform space—and help shape the future of distributed networking

What You'll Do:

Technical Leadership:

• Lead a world-class engineering team (8—12 engineers) working across backend, data plane, and frontend domains.
• Drive architecture decisions and guide the implementation of performant, testable, and maintainable codebases.
• Set the technical bar for full-stack quality, production readiness, and developer experience.
• Champion “shift-left” testing, performance profiling, and real-time observability.
• Nurture a culture of growth and ownership—conduct regular 1:1s, support career progression, and hire outstanding talent.
• Help scale the team from one pod to a cross-regional organization with a sustainable culture.

Control Plane Engineering:

• Own the design and delivery of control plane APIs (gRPC, REST, GraphQL) and state reconciliation loops for networking, observability, and security policies.
• Architect for reliability: multi-tenant support, global failover, secure multi-cluster sync (e.g. via Cross Cluster communications).
• Navigate distributed systems challenges—eventual consistency, CRDTs, rate-limiting, and RBAC enforcement.

Data Plane & Envoy Collaboration:

• Integrate deeply with the Envoy proxy layer, delivering WebAssembly-based policy extensions, circuit breakers, mTLS enforcement, and telemetry.
• Work with performance and networking engineers to push the envelope on latency, throughput, and policy scalability in the data path. UI Platform Ownership:
• Lead the development of our admin console and real-time topology dashboard—React/TypeScript-based, API-first, focused on UX for SREs and platform teams.
• Collaborate with designers and product to build tools that help users understand, debug, and secure complex microservice topologies.

Engineering Excellence & Operational Maturity:

• Integrate distributed tracing, Prometheus metrics, and logs with developer workflows.
• Establish clear SLOs and drive incident resolution and root-cause analysis for production outages.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration:
• Partner closely with SRE, Product, UX, Security, and Support teams.
• Act as a bridge to upstream open-source projects: Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, and Extension ecosystems (ex. WebAssembly).

Our Engineering Principles:

• APIs before UI—Everything starts with the API.
• Secure by default—Every component enforces least privilege.
• You build it, you run it—Teams own their code in production.
• Fail loudly and visibly—Observability is a first-class feature.
• Async over meetings—We optimize for remote, distributed autonomy.
• Bias for impact—We ship incrementally and improve continuously.

Real Challenges You'll Tackle:

• Scaling configuration reconciliation across tens of clusters globally.
• Designing zero-trust networking policies without degrading latency.
• Building dashboards that remain usable and performant with 1,000+ services and thousands of policy objects.
• Balancing declarative APIs with real-time imperative overrides during live traffic incidents.
• Leading postmortems after high-severity outages and driving long-term stability investments.

Required Qualifications:

• 15+ years in engineering, with 4+ years managing or leading distributed systems teams.
• Fluency in Go (or equivalent systems languages), gRPC/REST APIs, Kubernetes CRDs, and reconciliation loops.
• Deep understanding of L3/L4 load balancing, proxy systems (Envoy/Istio), and cloud-native security models (mTLS, JWT, OPA).
• Experience building modern UIs (React, TypeScript), and integrating frontend with real-time data and observability tools.
• Strong command of operational best practices: CI/CD, GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux), Terraform, OpenTelemetry, service ownership.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfort presenting to leadership and external stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Contributor to Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, or WebAssembly.
• Familiarity with eBPF, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or OPA/REGO.
• Experience leading hybrid SaaS/on-prem product delivery.
• Track record mentoring junior engineers into tech leads.
• Public speaking, blogging, or OSS advocacy.

Location: We are a fully distributed company with a presence in 15 countries globally, and we welcome talent from anywhere. This role specifically requires coverage of the North American time zone, so you must be willing to work within those hours.