Staff Software Engineer, Control Plane
Trend Micro· enterprise· Computer & Network Security· Aug 9, 2026 · 3mo agoPosted 79 days ago
Austin
Hybrid
Full-time
Staff
$175K–$240K est.
6+ years exp
Before you apply
Ghost Signal:
Open 79 days.
Job description
TrendAI™, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organizations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk.
At TrendAI™, we’re always seeking exceptional talent; people who want to collaborate with the best and push boundaries together. Here, your work goes beyond building a career. You will help protect what matters and play a vital role in shaping a safer, more trustworthy AI-powered future.
AI Fearlessly.
Job Description
Location: This is a hybrid role and requires in-office presence at our Austin, TX office three days per week.
Position Summary:
TrendAI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to evolve the Control Plane of the Threat Protection System (TPS), the management layer of our on-premises network security appliance. The Control Plane sits alongside the data plane and delivers the configuration, telemetry, high availability, and management surfaces that customers depend on. This role works primarily in modern C (C 17 moving to C 23) on Linux, extending the CLI, management services, configuration engine, the programmatic API consumed by our central management console, and the REST API and React web UI served from the device.
Value delivered to the broader unified security platform flows through the central management console, so a strong, well-versioned programmatic API surface is central to this role. This is a senior IC role. You will own features end to end, lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and represent the Control Plane in cross-team architecture discussions with the data plane and engine team.
Responsibilities:
1. Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and maintainable services in modern C (C 17 moving to C 23) across the Control Plane, including the CLI, management daemons, and supporting libraries.
2. Extend the configuration management subsystem, including validation, commit and save semantics, and compilation of high level policy into the low level form consumed by the data plane.
3. Build and evolve the on-device REST API surface and the React based web UI it serves, delivering a modern management experience alongside the long standing CLI and programmatic interfaces.
4. Own the design and evolution of the inter-process communication layer between the Control Plane and the data plane, balancing throughput and latency as the stack modernizes. Partner with the data plane and engine team on interface changes.
5. Own and evolve the programmatic API surface consumed by the central management console, applying strong versioning and backward compatibility discipline. This API is the primary channel through which TPS delivers value into the broader TrendAI Vision One platform, so schema stability, forward-looking design, and cross-release compatibility are first order concerns.
6. Contribute to technical design for cross cutting Control Plane concerns such as high availability, failover, configuration replication, and upgrade and migration paths.
7. Deliver features that improve device manageability, telemetry, health reporting, and certificate lifecycle, presented through the management console API and the on-device management surfaces.
8. Author and evolve automated tests, including C unit suites, Python driven system tests, REST and UI test harnesses, and CI jobs, and uphold static analysis and coding standard compliance in the areas you own.
9. Debug hard problems across the stack using core files, GDB, live daemons on hardware, packet captures with tcpdump and Wireshark, and inter-process traces, often on customer reported failures with limited reproducibility.
10. Investigate complex production support cases, particularly the ones that require domain expertise about a customer s environment, an interop quirk with a specific network or upstream device, or the judgment to propose a different approach to the underlying problem rather than only patching the reported symptom.
11. Shape the team s AI-augmented development workflow, including which categories of work run autonomously, where humans gate before merge or deploy, and what validation is nonnegotiable for a security product with a demanding compliance and reliability bar.
12. Collaborate with Product Managers, Architects, QA, Sustaining, and the data plane and engine team to scope features, converge on interfaces, and land changes that ship on TPS appliances, both physical and virtual.
13. Mentor engineers on the Control Plane team through code review, design review, and evolution of the team s C and C patterns.
Qualifications:
1. 6 years of professional experience building production systems software in C (C 17 or later) on Linux, with meaningful exposure to C in a mixed language codebase.
2. Working knowledge of POSIX and Linux systems programming, including processes and threads, event driven I/O, and inter-process communication over sockets.
3. Strong grasp of TCP/IP networking fundamentals and appliance side concerns, including routing, HA and failover semantics, and packet level debugging with tcpdump or Wireshark.
4. Experience designing and consuming REST APIs, including resource modeling, versioning, authn and authz, and error semantics.
5. Experience with a long lived RPC or service protocol where schema stability and backward compatibility matter (SOAP and WSDL, gRPC, or comparable).
6. Experience with shell scripting and Python for build tooling, automation, and system level testing.
7. Fluency with modern C build and quality tooling, including a mainstream build system (CMake or Make), GDB, a sanitizer or memory analyzer (AddressSanitizer or Valgrind), and a unit test framework.
8. Demonstrated experience using an agentic coding assistant (such as Claude Code, Cursor, or comparable) in real engineering work, and the judgment to direct it toward useful outcomes, review its output critically, and validate its correctness before it reaches shared branches.
9. Comfort with Git based development on a large mono-repo, code review discipline, and CI/CD via Jenkins.
10. Track record of shipping features into released, on-premises appliance software where hotfix is not a first class option, including thinking about upgrade paths, migration, and backward compatibility across releases.
11. Strong communication skills and a demonstrated ability to lead technical discussion, drive design reviews, write durable technical documentation, and mentor engineers of varying seniority.
12. BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degree welcome but not required.
Preferred Qualifications:
Strongest candidates bring 8 years of relevant experience, with meaningful time spent on any of the following:
- On-premises network security appliances such as IPS, IDS, firewall, load balancer, or router platforms, where the split between a management layer and a packet processing layer is a first class architectural concern.
- Familiarity with data plane and packet engine concepts (DPDK, kernel bypass, or userspace networking) sufficient to collaborate with a data plane team on the interface between the two layers.
- Working knowledge of React and modern JavaScript or TypeScript front end development, enough to contribute meaningfully to an on-device web UI and collaborate with front end focused engineers.
- Modern web on embedded or appliance devices, including REST served from a resource constrained on-premises device, with attention to auth session lifecycle, TLS and certificate handling, and CSRF and XSS hardening under a hostile threat model.
- Managing device fleets through a central management console, including designing the programmatic API on the device side, evolving that API across releases, and reasoning about how feature value reaches customers through that console rather than directly from the device.
- High availability design and debugging, including quorum, split brain, state replication, failover timing, and the operational failure modes that follow.
Familiarity with containerized development environments and reproducible builds.
- Experience contributing to or maintaining an internal coding standard for a mature C and C codebase, and helping newer contributors converge on team patterns.
About the team
The Control Plane team owns the management layer of TPS, including the CLI, programmatic APIs, REST API, React web UI, configuration engine, and high availability. We partner closely with the data plane and engine team on the interfaces between the two layers and on shipping full device features. The programmatic API surface consumed by the central management console is the primary channel through which TPS delivers value into the broader TrendAI Vision One platform, and it is a shared design focus across the team. New hires ramp on a specific area, but everyone on the team is expected to reach across those boundaries as features demand.
What We Offer You:
You re important to us. What matters to you, matters to us too. TrendAI provides benefit options for you and your family.
Comprehensive medical, dental and vision insurance
Life insurance
Short & Long Term Disability
Pre-partum, maternity, parental and medical leave
Mental Health Wellness Program
Adoption Assistance
Wellness Incentive
Pet Insurance
401(k) with company match
Paid Time Off
14 Annual Holidays
Tuition Assistance
Employee Resource Groups
We offer competitive compensation with bonus opportunity tied to company performance, along with room to enhance your skills through ongoing learning and broad technological opportunities. Achieving work-life balance is a priority, complemented by team activities, fostering an environment rooted in equity, inclusion, and collaboration, that is reflected in both our culture and our work.
Be Passionate. Be Innovative. Be a Trender.
#LI-JL1
At Trend Micro, we embrace change, empower people, and encourage innovation in a connected world. Our diversity and multicultural workforce are key contributing factors to our success across the globe. Trend Micro provides equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees. Trend Micro does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy and childbirth or related medical conditions, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care leave status, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
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