Senior Principal Software Engineer

We are Progress (Nasdaq: PRGS) - the trusted provider of software that enables our customers to develop, deploy and manage responsible, AI-powered applications and experiences with agility and ease. We’re proud to have a diverse, global team where we value the individual and enrich our culture by considering varied perspectives because we believe people power progress. Join us as a Software Engineer, Senior Principal in our LoadMaster engineering team and help us do what we do best: propelling business forward.

This senior individual contributor role blends deep, hands-on software development with sustained technical leadership and ownership of critical LoadMaster areas. You will act as a technical authority across complex subsystems and architectural domains while staying actively involved in design, implementation, and complex problem solving. Your focus is the ongoing evolution, performance, security, and long-term maintainability of the LoadMaster platform.

In this role you will:

• Own engineering for critical functional and architectural areas of LoadMaster
• Design, implement, and deliver core features and platform components
• Serve as the technical authority for complex subsystems and problem areas
• Drive performance, scalability, security, and maintainability improvements
• Lead deep problem analysis and resolution across the stack
• Guide engineering requirements and architectural impact assessments
• Lead proofs of concept and prototypes to validate designs and de-risk approaches
• Provide ongoing technical guidance to globally distributed teams
• Mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering practices
• Collaborate with product, engineering leadership, and peers on roadmap and trade-offs
• Champion high-quality code, reviews, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to cross-team standards, tooling, and automation

Your background:

• Extensive experience delivering complex, high-performance Linux systems
• Expert C systems programming with a focus on low-latency TCP/IP networking
• Deep knowledge of Linux internals: networking stack, memory, kernel–userspace
• Proven performance engineering: profiling, bottleneck analysis, optimization
• Strong security background: threat modeling, cryptography, secure design
• Advanced Bash and Linux tooling for automation and diagnostics
• Solid understanding of CPU, memory, NUMA, and I/O for optimization
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team impact

It will be beneficial if you have:

• Expertise in authentication, WAF, load balancing, proxy architectures, and TLS
• Experience with embedded Linux and hardware acceleration
• Background in distributed systems across cloud or virtualized environments
• Observability practices across complex systems

If this sounds like you and fits your experience and career goals, we’d be happy to chat.   
What we offer in return is the opportunity to experience a great company culture with wonderful colleagues to learn from and collaborate with and also to enjoy: