SonicWall is a cybersecurity forerunner with more than 30 years of expertise and is recognized as a leading partner-first company, ensuring our partners and their customers are never alone in the fight against cybercrime. With the ability to build, scale and manage security across the cloud, hybrid and traditional environments in real-time, SonicWall provides relentless security against the most evasive cyberattacks across endless exposure points for increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled users. With its own threat research center, SonicWall can quickly and economically provide purpose-built security solutions to enable any organization—enterprise, government agencies and SMBs—around the world. For more information, visit www.sonicwall.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Role Overview

We are looking for a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer (Data Plane) to join the SonicWall Cloud Secure Edge (CSE) team. In this role, you will lead the design and development of high-performance, cloud-native data plane systems that power a modern Security Service Edge (SSE) platform.

You will be responsible for building scalable, low-latency traffic processing pipelines that enforce security policies and enable secure, Zero Trust access to applications, SaaS, and enterprise resources from any device, anywhere. This includes evolving a distributed data plane that delivers capabilities such as ZTNA, Secure Web Gateway, and VPN-as-a-Service, replacing legacy appliances with high-throughput, cloud-delivered enforcement systems.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build high-performance data plane systems for traffic processing and policy enforcement

• Develop low-latency, scalable packet processing pipelines handling large volumes of network traffic

• Implement L4–L7 inspection, filtering, and enforcement mechanisms

• Optimize systems for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency (CPU, memory, networking stack)

• Drive architectural decisions around distributed data plane design and traffic routing

• Work closely with control plane teams to integrate policy distribution and enforcement

• Debug and resolve performance bottlenecks in production traffic paths

• Mentor engineers and promote best practices in systems programming and performance engineering

What You’ll Bring

• 6+ years of system/software development experience in data plane or networking systems

• Strong expertise in Go, Rust, C, or C++, with a focus on concurrency and performance

• Proven experience building high-throughput, low-latency systems

• Deep understanding of Linux networking stack (sockets, epoll, TCP/IP internals)

• Hands-on experience with packet processing frameworks or techniques (e.g., DPDK, eBPF, XDP, Netfilter, or similar)

• Strong knowledge of network protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS)

• Experience designing and operating distributed data plane architectures

• Familiarity with load balancing, traffic steering, NAT, proxying, and tunneling (IPSec, TLS, QUIC)

• Understanding of security enforcement in the data path (firewalling, ZTNA enforcement, DPI, policy engines)

• Ability to design for scale, resilience, and fault tolerance in traffic-heavy systems

• Strong debugging and performance-tuning skills in production environments

• Ability to lead initiatives, mentor engineers, and raise engineering excellence

• Strong use of AI tools with sound engineering judgment.

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SonicWall is an equal opportunity employer.  

We are committed to creating a diverse environment and are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

At SonicWall, we pride ourselves on recruiting a diverse mix of talented people and providing active security solutions in 100+ countries.

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