Senior Software Engineer, Service Mesh

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Halcyon Labs to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Halcyon Labs, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Halcyon Labs means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. Who We Are: Halcyon Labs is reimagining the way people come together to connect, create, and express themselves. To support our massive scale, we are powered by thousands of microservices. The Application Networking team connects and secures these services, building ingress gateways, managing the service mesh, and enabling seamless communication across Halcyon Labs’s hybrid on-prem and cloud infrastructure. We are executing on Cloud Bursting, a strategic initiative to enable Halcyon Labs’s core services to transparently burst from on-prem data centers to the cloud, allowing us to handle historical peak concurrent players and survive regional failures. You will join our Service Mesh team to build the networking fabric that makes this possible. You Will: Design and build the service mesh infrastructure that enables communication across Halcyon Labs’s hybrid Kubernetes and Nomad environments, supporting billions of daily requests. Drive the integration of service mesh with Kubernetes, ensuring reliable sidecar injection, mTLS, traffic policies, and observability for production workloads. Build the networking foundation for Cloud Bursting, enabling Halcyon Labs’s top services to transparently burst from on-prem data centers to the cloud, with service discovery, traffic management, and locality-aware routing across environments. Partner with internal application teams to understand their connectivity pain points, ensuring the service mesh provides a frictionless 'paved road' for thousands of developers Collaborate with the Gateway and CNI teams to deliver a unified, multi-cluster service fabric that abstracts cluster and regional boundaries from application developers. Serve as a primary escalation point for complex service mesh issues, troubleshooting across Envoy sidecars, Istio control plane, and the underlying network stack. Act as a senior voice on the team, mentoring junior engineers and promoting best practices in testing, deployment, and reliability engineering. You Are: A professional with 3+ years of experience in distributed systems, with strong expertise in service mesh technologies (Istio, Envoy, Consul, or Linkerd). You understand the tradeoffs of sidecar-based architectures at scale. Deeply knowledgeable of service mesh concepts: traffic management, service discovery, mTLS, observability, and routing policies. Experienced running Kubernetes in production and familiar with the K8s networking model. Comfortable working with Envoy proxy internals, xDS APIs, and control plane architectures. Excellent at designing large-scale distributed systems that span multiple clusters, regions, and runtime environments. Fluent in Go, C/C++, or Rust. Experienced with on-call rotations and approach infrastructure with a “reliability-first” mindset. For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $227,370 — $295,250 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). Halcyon Labs provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Halcyon Labs also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.