Axon's Real Time Operations (RTO) division needs to build and scale a cloud control plane to manage its global IoT device fleets, ensuring situational awareness for emergency responders and improving response times, reducing cognitive load, and increasing responder safety.
Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating distributed systems at scale; proven track record of owning critical paths and SLOs.
- Deep expertise in control planes, service discovery, orchestration, partitioning/placement, and consistency models (CAP tradeoffs, CRDTs, leader/follower, quorum).
- Strong coding in Go (also acceptable: Java/Rust); design-first mindset, profiling and performance tuning (allocations, tail latency, lock contention).
- Cloud-native foundations: Kubernetes, containers, service mesh (Istio/Envoy), gRPC/HTTP/2, backpressure and circuit-breaking patterns.
- Streaming/eventing: Kafka/NATS/Pub-Sub, schema evolution (Protobuf/Avro), idempotency keys, and exactly-once vs at-least-once tradeoffs.
- Security: mTLS, OAuth/OIDC, JWT, x.509, HSM/KMS, structured threat modeling and mitigation.
- IoT protocols & fleet ops: MQTT, WebSockets, device twin/shadow patterns and FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO).
Responsibilities
- Own control-plane architecture for multi-tenant, planet-scale IoT fleets: device provisioning and lifecycle, device identity & PKI, configuration/state management (twin/shadow), command & control, policy/RBAC enforcement, OTA updates and rollout strategies, and authoritative device state.
- Drive reliability, safety, and security-by-design: zero-trust defaults, mutual TLS, certificate rotation at scale, least-privilege key management (HSM/KMS), robust secrets hygiene, threat modeling, and defense-in-depth for multi-tenancy.
- Lead cross-org technical strategy: set engineering standards (APIs, versioning, deprecation, rollout, testing), create long-range roadmaps, and mentor/level-up senior engineers across cloud and device teams.
- Partner with device teams on transport and protocol choices, schema and API contracts, edge–cloud sync models, staged rollouts, failure injection, and field-safe rollback.
- Establish end-to-end observability (metrics, tracing, structured/audit logs), actionable dashboards, incident response runbooks, and capacity planning with empirical load testing and cost guardrails.
Other
- Work Location: This role is based out of our Seattle office and follows a hybrid schedule. We rely on in-person collaboration and ask that team members work onsite Tuesdays through Fridays, with the flexibility to work remotely on Mondays, unless there is an approved workplace accommodation.
- Mentor/level-up senior engineers across cloud and device teams.
- Experience in regulated or safety-critical domains (e.g., public safety, medical, automotive), with audit and compliance rigor.
- "Own It" culture that values engineering excellence, pragmatic safety-at-scale, and measurable outcomes.
- We are an equal opportunity employer that promotes justice, advances equity, values diversity and fosters inclusion.
