The role
From CrowdStrike's own posting.
As a global leader in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. We work on large scale distributed systems, processing almost 3 trillion events per day and this traffic is growing daily. Our customers span all industries, and they count on CrowdStrike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We're proud to work for a mission-driven company leveraging AI to transform the way we work. CrowdStrikers drive their careers through flexibility and autonomy while also being expected to contribute to a culture of responsible AI adoption, experimentation, and innovation. We use an AI-first mindset as a force multiplier to proactively and continuously accelerate execution, build expertise, uncover insights, and solve complex problems. We’re always looking to add talented CrowdStrikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters? The future of cybersecurity starts with you.
About the Role:
CrowdStrike Falcon is the industry standard in cloud‑native cybersecurity and threat hunting, processing trillions of events per day. As a Principal SRE, you will operate at the intersection of our Core Platform and Embedded Reliability charters: building the foundational libraries, services, and tooling that every product group depends on, while embedding directly with product engineering teams and their leadership to drive reliability outcomes at scale.
While we embrace the SRE moniker, at CrowdStrike it means something far more service‑oriented and engineering‑heavy than traditional operations. This is hands‑on systems engineering — writing production code, re‑architecting critical systems, and eliminating entire classes of failure — not ticket management. It is far and away our most self‑driven and autonomous backend engineering role, with the freedom to move up, down, and laterally across the stack as needed.
You'll join a group with bottom‑up visibility and ownership of a fast‑expanding codebase (including AI‑based Detection & Response) and a far‑reaching mandate for service resiliency. Several key feature additions and critical re‑architecture initiatives are underway: deploying core services to additional cloud providers, modularizing into reusable components, improving core libraries and frameworks, maturing observability tooling (tracing, profiling, alerting, SLOs), and automating away manual toil across all of the above. Recent examples of the team's work include introducing adaptive concurrency into our core Kafka library to implement flow control that protects database performance, resolving critical issues in leader election libraries, and building infrastructure‑as‑code tooling that eliminated manual deployment processes.
At the Senior Engineer level, your influence is organizational. Product engineers and engineering leaders will come to you for guidance on architectural decisions because you've earned credibility through hands‑on work and delivered results. You will shape architectural choices that affect every feature development team and provide shared architectural components leveraged throughout the Falcon Platform — including Unified Search, Protobuf libraries, and other shared‑tier infrastructure.
Why This Role Matters: Our customers depend on us to protect their businesses from sophisticated threats, and reliability isn't optional — it's fundamental to our mission. Your work directly impacts whether organizations around the world can defend themselves against cyberattacks. You'll work on problems that matter, at a scale few companies can match, with the autonomy to make real architectural decisions.
Location: This position requires candidates to be based in Midtown Manhattan, NY; Redmond, WA; Sunnyvale, CA; or Austin, TX . It's a hybrid role, with employees typically working 2 to 3 days per week in the office .
What You'll Do:
Partner with engineering leadership across multiple product groups to define and drive multi‑year reliability roadmaps.
Design and implement architectural improvements to services, libraries, and platforms that impact teams across all of CrowdStrike.
Develop and maintain services that meet aggressive reliability and scalability demands.
Extend and build new libraries for cross‑cutting concerns spanning CrowdStrike's cloud platform, which comprises hundreds of libraries and services.
Lead initiatives around reliability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency in large‑scale distributed systems.
Establish foundational observability practices: ensure teams instrument services properly, react to signals effectively, and leverage observability to drive automation such as continuous delivery.
Define and implement service‑level objectives and error budgets that drive real decision‑making and prioritization.
Lead performance and cost optimization efforts: profiling, bottleneck analysis, capacity planning, and cloud efficiency improvements.
Conduct resilience engineering: chaos experiments, failure injection, failure modeling, and designing for graceful degradation.
Design and implement automation and infrastructure‑as‑code to improve infrastructure reliability and eliminate manual toil.
Provide technical leadership during complex incidents and ensure follow‑through on retrospectives with concrete improvements that eliminate entire classes of failures.
Identify opportunities to extract common patterns into shared libraries and tools, or partner with platform teams on improvements benefiting multiple product groups.
Continuously re‑evaluate our products to improve architecture, knowledge models, developer and user experience, performance, and stability.
Drive strategic technical decisions and influence infrastructure and operational improvements across the organization.
Mentor and coach engineers, raising the technical IQ of the team and driving architectural standards across the org.
Use and give back to the open source community; evangelize software engineering best practices, especially as they pertain to Go.
Brainstorm, define, and build collaboratively with members across multiple teams as an energetic self‑starter who owns and is accountable for deliverables.
What You'll Need:
10+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems and service‑oriented backends at scale.
5+ years developing microservices for a SaaS product in a modern backend language (Go, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Python, Node.js).
Expert‑level proficiency in at least one programming language, with expert‑level Go or demonstrated ability and willingness to reach expert level in Go.
Deep understanding of distributed systems: consensus algorithms, replication, consistency models, failure modes, and scalability patterns.
Proven experience scaling backend systems — sharding, partitioning, horizontal scaling, capacity planning, and performance optimization are second nature.
Deep understanding of multi‑threading, concurrency, and parallel processing.
Track record of making impactful architectural decisions at organizational scope and seeing them through to production.
Strong systems thinking and the ability to influence without direct authority across organizational boundaries.
Thorough command of engineering best practices: appropriate testing paradigms, effective peer code review, and resilient architecture.
Ability to thrive in a fast‑paced, test‑driven, collaborative, and iterative environment; strong team‑player orientation.
A desire to ship code and a love of seeing your bits run in production.
Degree in Computer Science, or commensurate experience in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
Proven experience utilizing AI techno