Senior Software Developer, Dataplane Adapters
Role Overview
We at Solace believe we build the world's best event broker – the backbone of real-time business, trusted to move billions of messages a day across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments with unmatched reliability and performance.
At the heart of the Solace Event Broker lies the Datapath – the engine responsible for moving messages at high rate, with low latency and utmost reliability.
The Dataplane Adapters team owns the protocol surface: the MQTT, AMQP, REST, RDP, and Kafka adapters that let clients and applications connect, publish, and consume messages.
This work spans our custom hardware appliance – built around FPGAs and a Cavium network processor – and our software broker running on Intel server processors.
The code is highly multi-threaded and performance-oriented, and our developers regularly go deep into TCP, hardware interfaces, and OS internals to deliver features that meet our strict performance and reliability bar.
This position is for a Senior Software Developer on the Dataplane Adapters team.
In this role you will be a key technical leader who contributes to the architecture of our protocol adapters and leads the design and delivery of the most complex features for how clients connect to the broker.
You will shape technical direction across the hardware and software platforms, mentor other developers, represent the team with customers and other R&D groups, and be a go-to person for the hardest performance and field problems.
Your expertise will shape how the world's largest enterprises move their most critical data.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
What You'll Do
- Lead Adapter Design: Contribute to the architecture of our protocol adapters, lead the design and technical delivery of the most complex features across the hardware appliance and software broker, and own the technical decisions within those features
- Drive Technical Innovation: Research and prototype new protocol features, networking techniques, and performance approaches to keep the Solace datapath ahead of the industry
- Develop Core Platform Features: Design and build the most complex, performance-critical adapter features in multi-threaded C++, going deep into TCP, hardware interfaces, and OS internals when needed
- Mentor and Lead: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to intermediate and junior developers, lead design and code reviews, and establish best practices for the team, including how we use AI-assisted development in performance-critical code
- Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work with product management, other datapath teams, hardware engineering, support, and customers to translate requirements into designs and to influence the product roadmap
- Ensure Quality and Performance: Define the testing and performance strategy for the adapters and lead the resolution of the hardest customer-found defects and performance escalations
- Stay Current: Stay ahead of messaging protocol standards, networking, and hardware trends, and apply this knowledge to drive continuous improvement at Solace
What You Bring
- Systems Expertise: 10+ years of software development experience with 5+ years writing multi-threaded, performance-oriented code in C++
- Programming Excellence: Expert-level proficiency in C++, concurrency, low-level memory management, and debugging complex applications with core files and code
- Systems Design: Experience designing and building high-throughput, low-latency systems (for example messaging systems, network stacks, storage engines, or trading platforms)
- Networking Depth: Solid understanding of TCP/IP, and a willingness to go deep into protocol specifications, Linux kernel behaviour, and hardware interfaces when a problem needs it
- AI-Assisted Development: Demonstrated proficiency with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, and good judgment about where they help and where they do not in performance-critical code
- Technical Leadership: Proven track record of leading technical teams, mentoring engineers, and driving complex technical projects to completion
- Communication Skills: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
- Field Experience: Track record of leading the resolution of the hardest customer-found defects and performance escalations
- A team player who enjoys collaborating with cross-functional teams
- Detail-oriented to ensure designs meet requirements and are built to high quality
Nice to Have
- Experience in network programming (POSIX sockets) and HTTP/REST client implementation
- Experience tuning applications for latency on Linux (scheduling, CPU affinity, memory, and I/O)
- Experience with performance profiling tools (perf, flame graphs, hardware counters) and kernel-bypass networking
- Familiar with MQTT, AMQP, REST, Kafka, or other messaging protocols at the specification level
- Familiar with hardware network processors (e.g. Cavium Octeon)
- Familiar with TLS and protocol security
- Contributions to open-source projects, protocol standards bodies, patents, or conference talks
- Why You'll Love Working at Solace
- At Solace, we're all about smart people, meaningful work, and good vibes.
- Work with brilliance – Our team is packed with some of the sharpest minds in the industry.
- Balance matters – We believe work should fit into your life, not the other way around.
- Hybrid-first – Flexibility is built into how we work, so everyone feels included and empowered.
- Values-driven – We live and breathe our core values: craftsmanship, trust, courage, freedom, momentum, humility, and human experience.
- Growth mindset – Our training programs are designed to help you level up, fast.
- Customer Obsessed – We're proud of our world-class customer lineup (we're not shy about it).
- Keep it fun – We're social, we keep things simple, and we know how to have a good time.
- Creative culture – We've got a great sense of humor and we make cool videos on topics like MITT and this (check them out!).
- At Solace, we are committed to a fair, inclusive, and transparent recruitment process.
- To help identify candidates whose qualifications best align with the role, we use artificial intelligence (AI) tools during the initial stage of resume screening. These tools compare submitted resumes to the job description, focusing on education, experience, and skills.
- Importantly, all decisions beyond this initial screening—including interviews and final hiring—are made by our human recruitment team. AI is never used to make final hiring decisions.
- Let’s Talk
- Not sure you meet every requirement? That’s okay — we’re more interested in your potential and passion. If this role excites you, we’d love to hear from you.
- Need accommodations during the hiring process? Just let us know — we’re here to support you.
- Thanks to everyone who applies! While we wish we could connect with every candidate, only those selected to move forward will be contacted.
- At Solace, we believe that diversity and inclusion drive innovation and growth, both in business and in life. We strive to create an enriching and safe workplace where you can be who you are. If you want to do the best work of your career and feel supported every step of the way, we encourage you to join us!
- #LI-NM1
About Solace
Enterprise software company providing real-time event-streaming infrastructure that connects applications, clouds, AI agents, and devices.
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