Level

Fastly

Staff Software Engineer, Compute Platform

Fastly is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Compute Platform in Denver and San Francisco, United States. It pays $211k-$254k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

AI in this role

Scale serverless edge hosting infrastructure using Rust as a Staff Software Engineer on the Compute Platform team at Fastly.

rustwasmtime
systems-programmingserverless-architecturenetworkingdistributed-systems

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including GitHub, Yelp, Paramount, and JetBlue.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

Posting Open Date: 10/01/2026

Anticipated Posting Close Date*: 12/31/2026

*Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.

Staff Software Engineer, Compute Platform

This team builds the platform for Fastly’s Compute – an advanced serverless platform built on open standards which runs on our global edge network. It’s designed to address the requirements of modern application development by empowering customers to run code in a highly secure execution environment with microsecond cold start times, at scale, on the edge.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join this multifaceted team and help scale our hosting infrastructure. In addition to nuts-and-bolts networking and systems-level work, this role will involve cross-team collaboration, and designing high quality APIs for our customers to use services developed by other teams. There is also opportunity to contribute to open source projects (like Wasmtime) that are key parts of the Compute story. 

What You'll Do:

  • Coordinate and communicate seamlessly with the team members and across other technical and product teams
  • Contribute to code reviews, improving the codebase and other team processes
  • Manage projects from a technical lead role driving project progress and communicating project status to stakeholders
  • Write platform-level code in Rust that handles host concerns like back pressure, resource limits, and interactions with other services
  • Analyze and address performance and stability issues to meet high scale requirements
  • Be responsible for a large scale production system with extremely high performance and availability requirements

What We're Looking For: 

  • You have at least 7 years of software development experience, with at least 3 of those in high-reliability systems programming, ideally in Rust.
  • Comfortable writing asynchronous, concurrent code
  • A willingness to dive into and learn bleeding-edge and developing technologies

 

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

  • Understanding of security concerns in multi-tenant systems
  • Experience with multiprocess scheduling and memory management
  • Experience with systems-level optimization
  • Experience with and interest in technical writing
  • History of open source contribution

Work Hours

  • This position will require you to be available during core business hours, with a strong preference for Western and Mountain time zones. You will be required to be part of the on call rotation for the team.

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements: 

This position is open to Hybrid and Remote Work Locations.

The preferred locations for this position are:

  • San Francisco, United States
  • Denver, United States
  • Remote, United States

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.  

We are also willing to consider remote candidates in the United States.

This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager.

SF / LA Fair Chance Ordinance Statement

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Salary:

The estimated salary range for this position is $211,370- $253,644.

Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits: 

We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with Fastly. Curious about our offerings? 

We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to meet your needs. Our offerings may vary depending on the country where you work and are subject to change.

Why Fastly?

  • We have a huge impact. Fastly is a small company with a big reach. Not only do our customers have a tremendous user base, but we also support a growing number of open source projects and initiatives. Outside of code, employees are encouraged to share causes close to their heart with others so we can help lend a supportive hand.

  • We value diversity. Growing and maintaining our inclusive and diverse team matters to us. We are committed to being a company where our employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work and have the ability to be successful -- every day.

  • We are passionate. Fastly is chock full of passionate people and we’re not ‘one size fits all’. Fastly employs authors, pilots, skiers, parents (of humans and animals), makeup geeks, coffee connoisseurs, and more. We love employees for who they are and what they are passionate about.

We’re always looking for humble, sharp, and creative folks to join the Fastly team. If you think you might be a fit please apply! A fully completed application and resume or CV are required when applying.

All job applications must be submitted through our official careers site at www.fastly.com/about/careers. We will never request sensitive information, such as your Social Security number, bank account or credit card information during the application process. All official communication will come from an @fastly.com or @recruiting.fastly.com email address.

Fastly is committed to ensuring equal employment opportunity and to providing employees with a safe and welcoming work environment free of discrimination and harassment. Our employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, family or parental status, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and federal or state disability laws, Fastly will provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact your Recruiter, or the Fastly Employee Relations team at candidateaccommodations@fastly.com or 501-287-4901. 

Fastly collects and processes personal data submitted by job applicants in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Please see our privacy notice for job applicants.

How we rate this

Staff Software Engineer, Compute Platform at Fastly rates 0 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Systems ProgrammingServerless ArchitectureNetworkingDistributed SystemsRustWasmtime

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where systems programming was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where serverless architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where networking was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Rust in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Systems Programming, Serverless Architecture, Networking, Distributed Systems, and Rust. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.

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