Staff Backend Engineer - Performance - US

We are looking for product-focused systems engineers to work on Teleport Core Product.

You will work on problems ranging from performance and scalability, security and networking, to integrations with external systems.

You will work on the full product lifecycle from working with customers to understand their problems, writing RFDs for your proposed design, implementing, testing, and documenting.

Teleport is an open core project, and most of the code you will write will be open source and written in Go.

What Youll do

• Become an expert on scalability, performance, and reliability of Teleport in large deployments.
• Design, develop, and ship outstanding, high-quality products.
• Lead a distributed team of outstanding engineers.
• Write most of the code in Go.
• Closely collaborate with other teams at Teleport on matters related to scalability and performance.
• Work directly with our customers to diagnose and remediate performance issues.
• Grow your technical expertise., Our process is designed to be straightforward and respectful of your time. We skip performative rounds and focus on what matters: understanding how you think and what you can do.

For this role, we use a take-home challenge that mirrors real work at Teleport - on your time, your way. Youll have support from the team throughout.

• Zoom meeting with a Teleport recruiter. You’ll learn about the company, our products, compensation philosophy, interview process, and key requirements.
• Zoom meeting with the Hiring Manager. The Hiring Manager will walk you through the coding challenge and answer your questions.
• Coding challenge collaboration. The day after your meeting with the Hiring Manager, you join a Slack channel and complete a coding challenge in Go using GitHub. The challenge usually takes about 2 weeks and ends with a Zoom meeting with the Hiring Manager and a member of the interview team to review your solution.
• If your challenge solution meets our bar, youll receive an offer to join Teleport.

Why Teleport

Youre joining a company where the problem is real, the team is small, and your work shows up directly in the product. Were not a big company, you wont get lost in a crowd. Youll have the freedom and autonomy to do what youre great at, alongside teammates who care about doing it right and want to see you succeed. The work is collaborative, theres real room to grow, and the mission is one worth showing up for.

Remote-first and globally distributed, were genuinely passionate about what were building.

The Benefits

At Teleport, we believe your career is more important than a list of perks. Thats why we focus on making your day-to-day the best it can be - giving you the autonomy, access, and support to do the best work of your career.

• Extensive health coverage
• Annual expense budget
• Rest and recovery policies that maximize your ability to recharge
• Investment in your future with retirement savings plans
• Professional development opportunities

Cryptography, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Systems Engineering, Network Integration, Product Lifecycle, Documentation, Testing, Open Source, Team Lead/Manager, Identify Issues, * Willingness to work collaboratively with Teleports engineers on coding challenge in Go as part of the interview process.

• Builder mentality and experience – you love being hands-on and building zero-to-one products.
• Extensive Go experience.
• Extensive experience developing scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems and platforms.
• Strong team leadership.
• Engineering management experience.
• Linux systems engineering experience.
• Knowledge of Identity Management, RBAC, ABAC, and zero-trust security models.
• Intellectual curiosity and a willingness to master new technologies.
• Transparency, honesty, and a no-ego mindset.
• Significant contributions in Open Source is a big plus.

About Teleport

Dont wait for the future of infrastructure. Be part of it.

Teleport is the AI Infrastructure Identity Company. Were solving one of the hardest problems in security: giving every human, machine, workload, and AI agent a cryptographically secured identity, improving engineering velocity while maintaining security. We make trusted computing simple. This gives you the freedom, power, and autonomy to build and innovate with confidence.

Remote-first and globally distributed, we work with companies like Nasdaq, DoorDash, and Elastic to secure infrastructure for an AI world.