Staff Software Engineer, Control Plane

About this role

TrendAI™, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organizations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk.   At TrendAI™, we’re always seeking exceptional talent; people who want to collaborate with the best and push boundaries together. Here, your work goes beyond building a career. You will help protect what matters and play a vital role in shaping a safer, more trustworthy AI-powered future.   AI Fearlessly.

Job Description

Location: This is a hybrid role and requires in-office presence at our Austin, TX office three days per week.

Position Summary:

TrendAI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to evolve the Control Plane of the Threat Protection System (TPS), the management layer of our on-premises network security appliance. The Control Plane sits alongside the data plane and delivers the configuration, telemetry, high availability, and management surfaces that customers depend on. This role works primarily in modern C++(C++17 moving to C++23) on Linux, extending the CLI, management services, configuration engine, the programmatic API consumed by our central management console, and the REST API and React web UI served from the device.

Value delivered to the broader unified security platform flows through the central management console, so a strong, well-versioned programmatic API surface is central to this role. This is a senior IC role. You will own features end to end, lead technical direction, mentor engineers, and represent the Control Plane in cross-team architecture discussions with the data plane and engine team.

Responsibilities:

1. Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and maintainable services in modern C++ (C++17 moving to C++23) across the Control Plane, including the CLI, management daemons, and supporting libraries.

2. Extend the configuration management subsystem, including validation, commit and save semantics, and compilation of high level policy into the low level form consumed by the data plane.

3. Build and evolve the on-device REST API surface and the React based web UI it serves, delivering a modern management experience alongside the long standing CLI and programmatic interfaces.

4. Own the design and evolution of the inter-process communication layer between the Control Plane and the data plane, balancing throughput and latency as the stack modernizes. Partner with the data plane and engine team on interface changes.

5. Own and evolve the programmatic API surface consumed by the central management console, applying strong versioning and backward compatibility discipline. This API is the primary channel through which TPS delivers value into the broader TrendAI Vision One platform, so schema stability, forward-looking design, and cross-release compatibility are first order concerns.

6. Contribute to technical design for cross cutting Control Plane concerns such as high availability, failover, configuration replication, and upgrade and migration paths.

7. Deliver features that improve device manageability, telemetry, health reporting, and certificate lifecycle, presented through the management console API and the on-device management surfaces.

8. Author and evolve automated tests, including C++ unit suites, Python driven system tests, REST and UI test harnesses, and CI jobs, and uphold static analysis and coding standard compliance in the areas you own.

9. Debug hard problems across the stack using core files, GDB, live daemons on hardware, packet captures with tcpdump and Wireshark, and inter-process traces, often on customer reported failures with limited reproducibility.

10. Investigate complex production support cases, particularly the ones that require domain expertise about a customer's environment, an interop quirk with a specific network or upstream device, or the judgment to propose a different approach to the underlying problem rather than only patching the reported symptom.

11. Shape the team's AI-augmented development workflow, including which categories of work run autonomously, where humans gate before merge or deploy, and what validation is nonnegotiable for a security product with a demanding compliance and reliability bar.

12. Collaborate with Product Managers, Architects, QA, Sustaining, and the data plane and engine team to scope features, converge on interfaces, and land changes that ship on TPS appliances, both physical and virtual.

13. Mentor engineers on the Control Plane team through code review, design review, and evolution of the team's C and C++ patterns.

Qualifications:

1. 6+ years of professional experience building production systems software in C++ (C++17 or later) on Linux, with meaningful exposure to C in a mixed language codebase.

2. Working knowledge of POSIX and Linux systems programming, including processes and threads, event driven I/O, and inter-process communication over sockets.

3. Strong grasp of TCP/IP networking fundamentals and appliance side concerns, including routing, HA and failover semantics, and packet level debugging with tcpdump or Wireshark.

4. Experience designing and consuming REST APIs, including resource modeling, versioning, authn and authz, and error semantics.

5. Experience with a long lived RPC or service protocol where schema stability and backward compatibility matter (SOAP and WSDL, gRPC, or comparable).

6. Experience with shell scripting and Python for build tooling, automation, and system level testing.

7. Fluency with modern C++ build and quality tooling, including a mainstream build system (CMake or Make), GDB, a sanitizer or memory analyzer (AddressSanitizer or Valgrind), and a unit test framework.

8. Demonstrated experience using an agentic coding assistant (such as Claude Code, Cursor, or comparable) in real engineering work, and the judgment to direct it toward useful outcomes, review its output critically, and validate its correctness befor

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