Multiple Jobs for a Profitable Network Security Company, Peninsula, SF Bay Area
Greg Snoddy
Company:
A very successful and profitable mature startup company is growing rapidly and looking for top senior talent within the embedded systems, kernel level programmers and technical managers. Our client develops a network appliance for high capacity network taps that can operate faster than anyone in the market place with more features. They are the thought leader within this space and rapidly growing the company.
They have approximately 100 people on the team working on the peninsula of San Francisco Bay Area and they are growing their teams to meet up with demand for their products. The company is about 7 years old and was founded by several security experts. They grew via customer acquisition until reaching profitability. Once they became profitable they raised a venture capital round of over 20 million dollars in late 2010 for expansion and to continue to innovate. They have top tier VC’s, but have given away very little of the equity away, due to their positive financial position.
Product
Their network appliance is very bleeding edge and has the ability to work at line rate doing network mirroring, aggregation, filtering, deep packet inspection and distributed traffic capture. They design the hardware, software and firmware. Their product does different types of routing and switching at the VLAN level. They operate mostly at L2/L3 level, but have the ability to work at the higher layers as well L4-L7. Their product has multiple inputs and outputs and takes different ports and puts into different areas to help monitor traffic real-time without losing performance and offering maximum uptime. Using their product enterprise companies and carriers experience an increased availability of mission critical applications, lower cost of monitoring their networks, lower cost of management, and increased end-user protection.
Their product works within large, complex distributed systems, so their customers are companies within storage, security/ intrusion detection, enterprise, finance and government. Their product model is to enhance tools and they take care of the high level network issues. An example of this could be an IPS vendor could use their product to enhance the high performance issue and allows the IPS vendor to build a distributed architecture. Their product’s IP is the distributed architecture and algorithms.
Groups/Technology:
There are 5 groups that make up their engineering team:
- Hardware Group – Contains FPGA, PCB, Multi-core architecture for all products
- Systems Group – Systems level programming mostly Linux OS kernel programming, threading, control user plane or network plane/stack
- Advance Products Group – marries security, systems and embedded multi-core and search (search is built into hardware, not search engine).
- There is also a QA group that is completely separate group, yet still part of engineering.
- The NMS systems that develops the GUI to configure their product. You configure their product based on what you want it to do: filtering, load balancing, mirroring, deep packet inspection, etc.
The architecture is extremely flexible. Customers can use either the search piece or the chip piece separately or use them together within their environments.
Their technology is mostly off the shelf hardware, Linux as the operating system and most of the product is developed in C and C++. This is a complex distributed multi-core architecture.
The value adds of the product are:
· Performance
· Ability to do distributed monitoring
· In-Fabric and software manipulation
· Traffic distribution
· Load balancing
· Device awareness – auto healing and self-discovery
Job Openings
There are 6-7 positions we have been hired to fill. These are all senior level roles with 8-10 plus years of experience. They are looking for people who understand IP networking and distributed systems.
There are 1-2 openings within the Advanced Products Group – this is embedded systems development roles, one is focused on the security piece of the product and the other will work on the search engine technology. Both require good knowledge of Linux Kernel threading or the network stack, experience working on L2/L3 issues, good knowledge of high performance multi-core IP networks, and good TCP/IP knowledge.
There is a hands-on technical manager for the NMS (network management systems). This role is more GUI focused and less on the server part of the NMS systems.
Finally there are one or two roles within the systems group. Both are focused on L2/L3 and some L4 and are focused on high-availability, performance, and interfacing with FPGA’s and chipsets. Both require good knowledge of Linux/Unix Kernel threading or the network stack, good knowledge of high performance multi-core IP networks, and good TCP/IP knowledge.
There is a need to hire a senior level person to work a Network Security Architect that will do more algorithm development and advance research.
1) Title: Linux Kernel, Multi-Core Systems Developer
Role:
You will work in the advance product team concentrating on the multi-core application group to build out the functionality of the embedded security application or someone working on the transactional applications. These are embedded applications that maximize how well the applications work and optimize the performance of the entire system. Depending on the individual the first individual will lend a hand with bringing up the search engine technology (this is a highly specialized hardware, highly parallel deep packet inspection application. This is similar architecture to Caviuum, Talera and/or Broadcom’s products that do high performance parsing and search). The second person would be working on improving the performance part of the transactional applications along with fine tuning their highly specialized OS’s. This person should be good working with high network performance, but not a performance engineer.
Other Responsibilities:
• The design and development of embedded, multi-core Linux/C software for real-time network applications including network data monitoring and management, packet search and inspection.
• Functional specifications, design, development, and documentation of software for very high- performance packet processing and network monitoring applications.
• Collaborate with QA, Hardware, Manufacturing and other software developers as needed.
Requirements and Experience:
• BS or MS (Preferred) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or closely related discipline
• 8+ years successfully developing very high-performance, highly reliable embedded systems for the telecommunications, service provider or large enterprise markets using ‘C’ programming and the use of Linux and multi-core chipsets.
• Strong domain knowledge of network architecture, including wireline and wireless networks preferred.
• Must have knowledge of Ethernet and IP network protocols.
· Good knowledge of L2/L3 networks
· Excellent experience working with Linux/Unix Kernel – Network Stack and/or Threading
2 and 3) Title – (2) Linux Datacom Software Developer
Role:
These 2 roles work within the systems group of the company. The roles are an embedded software roles using Linux as the RTOS. These roles goes through the entire systems software and makes sure that the product has the highest availability, new and better performance, extend functionality, contribute to the new 4th generation architecture, a complete re-tooling of the product, understanding hardware dependencies, and make sure the network plane is doing what it is suppose to do. Also making sure that the OS is available and ready for the end users to help manage the systems.
This is a fast-paced and profitable startup with a commitment to excellence and efficiency. The company has a growing customer base, and is expanding their product development capabilities to continue its successful growth and expansion, meet demand, and develop new capabilities for their 4th Generation product line.
You will be a key part of the development team and work closely with QA, and Software Teams.
Other Responsibilities:
• Development of software for real-time network applications including network data monitoring and management, advanced system architectures and packet processing functionality.
• Design and functional specifications of software for very high-performance packet search and inspection.
• Collaborate with QA, Hardware, Firmware, Manufacturing and other software developers.
Requirements and Experience:
• BS or MS (Preferred) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or closely related discipline
• 8+ years successfully developing very high-performance, highly reliable network systems
- Proficiency in C/C++, TCL, Perl, Java Script and Shell scripts, within a *ux (Linux, Unix) OS environment
- Strong L2-L3, Networking background and experience, including Ethernet, and POS
- Expertise in L4-L7, Packet processing and network protocols
- Good knowledge of operating systems kernel (Linux/Unix)
- Strong domain knowledge of network architecture, including wireline and wireless, LTE networks and SONET networks a plus.
- Hardware background and the use of emulators, scopes and logic/protocol analyzers a plus.
4) Title – NMS Manager
Role:
This person is responsible for the leading a small group of 4 people and growing the team as the business increases. The team is currently comprised of a systems person, one Interface person, one GUI and CLI person, and Embedded API person.
They want a technical hands-on manager. This is not necessarily a coding role, but the manager should be hands-on to architect and hold his team accountable for producing top quality code and products. Ideally that would like someone that is more on the GUI side of the NMS product offering versus server, and that person could lead all of the efforts of that part of the NMS.
The product is very GUI driven, so this group plays a very important function since the configuring the appliance is done via the GUI. They use a light weight UI approach, so the NMS is not SNMP based. They use this approach to get the statistics of the network and bundle them and communicate with the taps for communication and for display and processing. They do some SNMP within the architecture to get certain statistics, for instance for RMON and the network MIB. Using SNMP for setting up traps and set thresholds. The NMS is very close to the wire.
The NMS has several functions it performs for the product:
· Dashboard – pie charts, line charts, displaying network activity, they use OLAP or an historical database for capturing data
· Network Map – to visually see the different network devices that comprise the physical network
· Health and Housekeeping – configuring the product for use, configure status, upgrades, updates, etc.
They heavily use XML within the NMS. This management system is very session or database oriented, so they cannot use a relational database like MySQL for this, since they are looking for performance and real-time, so they must use something like an in-memory database.
Requirements:
· 10 plus years of experience building management systems for enterprise IP network environments
· 4 years plus of technical management or leadership experience
· Expert knowledge in Java or C++ or some other object oriented language
· Should have used XML extensively
· Knowledge of the entire software stack of the NMS systems with an emphasis in leading the efforts for designing an easy to use GUI
· Experience developing applications with a proven track record with L2/L3 IP networking space, L4 and above is a big plus
- BS or MS (Preferred) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or closely related discipline
- Knowledge with network security products is a big plus
5) Title - Network Security Architect –
There is a need to hire a senior level person to work a Network Security Architect that will do more algorithm development and advance research. This is someone focused on product versus a pure research person or scientist. They would work closely with their security consultant out of UC Berkeley and work closely with the CTO.
6) Title - Director of Engineering: Hardware and Systems –
Responsibilities include:
- Drive product and technology strategy while participating in product definitions and specification development.
- Support the technology direction as well as build and execute against project plans that support engineering/product development goals.
- Track and manage project timelines as well as identifying resource and scheduling conflicts to ensure timely completion of projects.
- Create and enforce development standards to establish efficient use of resources.
- Set individual and team objectives. Prepare staff reviews, and resolve personnel issues when required. Define, and provide measurable goals and objectives for the team to maintain optimal performance and achieve company objectives.
- Provide strong leadership and motivation to the engineering organization.
- Create and foster collaborative relationships while supporting manufacturing, QA/testing and customer support needs.
- Partner with product/executive management to understand business goals and translate those goals into both a vision for the team and into achievable solutions that can be delivered with the desired time to market.
- Manage a high performance team of engineers while building a culture of dependable execution and delivery, while simultaneously fostering innovation within those teams.
Requirements and Experience:
- BS/MS in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering highly desired.
- 8+ years of experience managing high-end network product design
- Strong knowledge and experience in high-end networking product design, network switch and routing, network analysis or similar network appliances.
- Proven track record bringing both hardware and software projects to successful completion.
- Ability to manage multiple projects while under tight deadlines.
- Experience with embedded software and multicore processors.
- Ability to work with a broad range of groups and drive consensus towards a solution
- Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot and triage complex software and networking equipment.
- Professional demeanor with “can do” attitude, and excellent organizational skills.
- Must have excellent oral/written communication skills.
Greg Snoddy | Director | SearchTech Consulting
408 402 5027 (o) | 408 410 2158 (c)