Senior Software Engineer, Core Systems (Rust)

ABOUT PUBNUB

PubNub is a San Francisco–based technology company that powers real-time interactive experiences that drive engagement, retention, and monetization. Our platform enables organizations to efficiently build, manage, and optimize real-time applications used by millions of people around the world. Founded in 2012, PubNub serves more than 2,000 companies globally, including Amazon, RingCentral, Gameloft, and DAZN. Our secure, low-latency platform scales worldwide, helping customers launch and enhance applications that engage users and deliver business results. Engineering teams at PubNub build and operate the systems behind our globally distributed platform. Our infrastructure processes trillions of transactions each month across 15+ data centers worldwide, enabling reliable, low-latency real-time experiences at scale.

ABOUT THE ROLE

PubNub is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Core team and help build and operate the foundational services behind our real-time platform. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on designing, building, and operating distributed systems in Rust. You'll work on services that power messaging, eventing, presence, storage, history, search, and fanout across our globally distributed platform. You'll help evolve systems that process trillions of transactions each month, with a focus on reliability, performance, observability, and operational excellence. Engineers on the Core team own services from development through production operations, including monitoring, incident response, and capacity planning.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build core distributed systems in Rust.
• Design scalable and fault-tolerant platform services.
• Develop messaging, storage, and eventing infrastructure.
• Improve system reliability and operational resilience.
• Own services from development through production operations.
• Create metrics, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks.
• Support incident response and capacity planning.
• Optimize latency, throughput, and system performance.
• Work across cloud infrastructure and data systems.
• Use AI tools thoughtfully to improve engineering workflows.

ABOUT YOU

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

• Strong experience building production systems in Rust.
• Experience with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
• Deep understanding of fault tolerance and concurrency.
• Experience operating production services at scale.
• Experience with Kubernetes-based environments.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with AWS infrastructure.
• Experience with Cassandra, DynamoDB, Redis, or Aurora.
• Exposure to Go or Python.
• Strong observability and debugging experience.
• Experience supporting high-scale distributed systems.

LOCATION

Bay Area candidates preferred. Remote candidates will also be considered.

WHY JOIN PUBNUB

• Build infrastructure processing trillions of transactions monthly.
• Work on distributed systems operating at global scale.
• Own services from design through production operations.
• Solve reliability, performance, and scalability challenges.
• Collaborate with experienced platform engineers.
• Contribute to systems used by millions worldwide.
• Remote-first environment with autonomy and ownership.

COMPENSATION

Compensation range: $140,000–$170,000 per year, plus equity eligibility. Compensation is determined based on experience, skills, location, and business needs.

APPLY

Join PubNub's Core team and help build the systems that power real-time applications worldwide. If you enjoy distributed systems, Rust, and operating services at scale, we'd like to hear from you.

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

PubNub is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace for all employees and applicants. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business needs without regard to legally protected characteristics.

WORK AUTHORIZATION REQUIREMENT

Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the country where they are hired. PubNub does not provide employment visa sponsorship for this role.

INFORMATION ACCURACY NOTE

Candidates are expected to provide accurate and truthful information throughout the application and hiring process. Any misrepresentation or omission of material information may affect employment eligibility.