Why Buoyant (Linkerd Creators) Uses Rust Here
Latency spikes kill throughput. Linkerd2-proxy pioneered the Tower `Service` abstraction in Rust, delivering automated mTLS, EWMA latency-aware load balancing, and HTTP/2 multiplexing in <15MB RSS.
We are hiring a Principal Rust Service Mesh Proxy Engineer (Linkerd2-proxy) (US / EU Remote) at $185,000 to $245,000 USD. Advance HTTP/2 and gRPC load-balancing algorithms, maintain `tokio-rustls` SPIFFE identity rotation, and audit proxy memory footprint.
Day-to-Day Engineering Scope
- Architect and benchmark core crates built around Tokio and Hyper and Tonic and rustls and Prost.
- Replace allocation-heavy paths with zero-copy buffers, arena allocators, or lock-free ring queues.
- Pair with upstream open-source maintainers and internal platform teams to ship fault-tolerant releases.
Technical Expectations & Pay
- Demonstrated mastery of Rust ownership, pinning, lifetimes, and concurrency primitives (Tokio, Hyper, Tonic).
- Comfort reading assembly output (`cargo asm`), kernel tracepoints, or wire protocol captures when abstractions leak.
- Verified package: $185,000 to $245,000 USD base salary plus competitive equity and global remote healthcare.
