Staff Engineer / Lead Engineer

About Costa Security:

Costa Security is building Zero-Trust AI infrastructure to help enterprises safely deploy and scale agentic AI. Our platform provides seamless governance, access control, security filtering, and deep observability. By protecting companies from AI-related data leaks, we unlock the full potential of AI tools like GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, and future models, helping businesses innovate without compromising on security.

Our founding team previously built a zero-trust platform for securing complex enterprise environments—experience that gives us a unique edge in solving the hardest problems in AI security. Now, we're building on that foundation with an AI Gateway that delivers enterprise-grade access, control, and performance for the next generation of AI tools.

We're an experienced startup team, with our CEO having taken his last company public.

We're hiring for the following role:

**Staff / Lead Engineer**

- Strong experience designing and building production systems end-to-end
- Deep expertise with Ruby and Rails
- Hands-on experience building with AI tools and working with emerging AI Protocols (MCP, A2A)
- You lead with curiosity and ship with urgency

**Key Responsibilities:**

- Lead the design and development of production systems
- Drive architectural decisions for high-impact projects, ensuring scalability and reliability
- Co-author long-term technical roadmaps that set the vision for network scalability, performance, and engineering velocity
- Set the standard for a culture of engineering and operational excellence
- Build and nurture effective partnerships across engineering, product, and security teams
- Lead and conduct design reviews for critical projects with a focus on system-level tradeoffs and network scalability
- Drive the design and implementation of "secure by default" network systems in collaboration with security teams
- Act as a key stakeholder by engaging with customers and internal teams to understand business requirements and deliver innovative solutions
- Mentor and guide engineers, sharing best practices and design principles for building reliable and scalable networking systems
- Drive alignment across teams, ensuring roadmaps are cohesive and deliverables are on track

**Requirements:**

- Proven experience leading complex engineering efforts focused on network traffic management, network optimization, and cloud orchestration
- Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to align stakeholders and lead cross-functional teams
- A track record of contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and making thoughtful system-level tradeoffs
- At least 8+ years of coding experience in languages like Go, Java, or similar, with strong expertise in writing concurrent and distributed code
- Extensive experience designing and building distributed systems, leveraging concurrency primitives, and optimizing network performance
- Deep expertise in traffic and networking systems, with familiarity across adjacent infrastructure domains
- Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and the ability to optimize cost, performance, and scalability
- A strong sense of ownership and the ability to balance short-term priorities with long-term strategic goals
- Deep expertise with Ruby and Rails
- Hands-on experience building with AI tools and working with emerging AI Protocols (MCP, A2A)

**Compensation:**

The estimated pay range for this role is $150,000 - $190,000. This role is eligible to participate in Costa Security's equity plan.

**Join us on our mission to transform how applications are built!**