Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems (Rust)

ABOUT THE TEAM

Lattice is the software platform behind Anduril's autonomous systems. The Data Distribution team owns how data moves through it: the Distributed Service Bus (DSB), a messaging layer that carries every track, sensor reading, command, and video stream between nodes.

DSB runs on robots deployed at the edge, over networks that are slow, lossy, and sometimes gone entirely: tactical radios, satellite links, and wired networks, often all at once. Nodes join, leave, and get partitioned all the time. That makes this a distributed systems problem in the textbook sense, with consistency, delivery guarantees, and failure handling all in play, but with real bandwidth limits and real consequences when it doesn't work.

The team is small and the system is in active development. It's a good time to join if you want a large surface area and real ownership. 

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Messaging semantics. DSB provides pub/sub, reliable request/response, and ordered bidirectional streams with flow control. You'll design the delivery guarantees, retry and acknowledgement behavior, and backpressure that sit behind each one, and decide what each guarantee costs on a link that drops packets.
• Routing across a changing mesh. Topology changes constantly, and a node may have several paths to the same destination. You'll work on OSPF-style link-state routing, multi-path link selection, and prefix-based routing, and on keeping routing state convergent when the network splits and rejoins.
• Gossip and state dissemination. Subscription tables, topology, and node metadata have to propagate across the mesh without flooding it. You'll design and tune gossip protocols and reason about how and when they converge.
• Operating under constrained bandwidth. Some links carry a few kilobits per second. You'll build priority-based QoS scheduling, compression, and protocol-level optimizations so that the important traffic gets through first.
• gRPC over the mesh. You'll extend our gRPC proxy layer so existing services can talk to each other over DSB without changes, including service discovery, retries, and timeouts across unreliable links.
• Correctness through simulation. The same production code runs under a deterministic, manually clocked scheduler, so failures are reproducible. You'll build simulation harnesses and tests that find the bugs that only show up under partitions, reordering, and loss.
• Debugging real systems. You'll trace problems from packet captures on deployed hardware up to cloud infrastructure, using metrics, logs, and CLI tools for live mesh inspection.
• Secure transport. You'll implement authenticated, encrypted links over TCP and UDP (mTLS and DTLS), provide message authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality end to end, and keep the stack FIPS-compliant as it evolves. That includes handling certificate rotation and making sure the crypto doesn't eat the bandwidth budget on slow links.
• Design and rollout. You'll write RFCs for new protocol features and API surfaces, and work with product teams across the company to put DSB on new platforms and migrate them off the legacy message bus. 

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on distributed systems
• Solid distributed-systems fundamentals. You can reason about delivery guarantees, ordering, consistency, partition behavior, and failure modes, and explain why a given design does or doesn't converge.
• Production experience building or operating messaging systems, RPC frameworks, databases, or other distributed infrastructure
• Depth in a systems language (Rust, C, C++, or Go). Depth matters more than the specific language; we'll teach you Rust if you have the fundamentals.
• Working knowledge of networking: TCP/UDP, sockets, MTU, TLS/mTLS
• Familiarity with asynchronous programming (async/await, event loops, futures)
• Comfort with Protocol Buffers and/or gRPC
• A bias toward shipping and owning your work. The team is small, and what you build is what the rest of the platform runs on.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Production Rust
• Experience with gossip protocols, epidemic broadcast, or peer-to-peer overlay networks
• Familiarity with link-state routing (OSPF, IS-IS) or BGP
• Experience with deterministic simulation, fault injection, or property-based testing of distributed systems
• Experience with systems that run in resource-constrained or intermittently connected environments
• Ability to read packet captures and debug with tcpdump or Wireshark
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration