Staff Software Engineer | Systems and L7 Protocols
Formal, San Francisco
About the job
About Formal
Formal is building a network security platform for the AI era. As agents gain access to sensitive data and production systems, organizations need control over the actions they take and the data they receive. We enforce those controls directly in the network path, with a shared policy layer for humans and agents across databases, infrastructure, APIs, and AI tools.
We are trusted by leading companies such as Cursor http://cursor.com, Decagon https://decagon.ai, Notion http://Notion.com, and more to solve problems across data security and compliance, data quality management, and infrastructure access.
Formal is backed by top-tiers VCs including Thrive Capital and Y Combinator with angel investors that include executives and founders from Datadog, Clickhouse, Plaid, and Vanta.
About the role
Build the protocol-aware proxies at the core of Formal. You'll work on how connections are established, how application-layer protocols are parsed, and how requests and responses flow between clients and upstream systems.
The work goes beyond conventional web backends: understanding wire protocols, managing connection and session state, and working with existing clients without breaking their behavior or adding unnecessary latency. You'll also build the distributed backend that coordinates these proxies, owning projects from research and implementation through debugging and scaling in production.