Staff Software Engineer

TrendAI, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organizations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk.
 
At TrendAI, we’re always seeking exceptional talent; people who want to collaborate with the best and push boundaries together. Here, your work goes beyond building a career. You will help protect what matters and play a vital role in shaping a safer, more trustworthy AI-powered future.
 
AI Fearlessly.

About TrendAI 

TrendAI, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organizations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk. 

At TrendAI, we’re always seeking exceptional talent: people who want to collaborate with the best and push boundaries together. Here, your work goes beyond building a career. You will help protect what matters and play a vital role in shaping a safer, more trustworthy AI-powered future. 

AI Fearlessly. 

Position Summary: 

TrendAI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the architectural evolution of our on-premises network security management appliance and its bridge to our cloud microservices platform. The role is anchored in the appliance backend, a mature Java codebase running on WildFly (EJBs, JPA, JMS, JAX-RS, SOAP, and REST) with MariaDB and ColumnStore data tiers. You will lead the modernization of this monolith, untangling complex subsystems and optimizing high-throughput, multi-threaded services.

This is a full-stack technical leadership role. You will deliver modern web management surfaces with React and TypeScript, and expand into companion cloud microservices built with Go and Node on AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, AWS IoT). As a Staff IC, you will own technical direction, mentor engineers across teams, and champion AI-augmented development workflows to accelerate delivery while maintaining enterprise reliability.

Work Location: Austin, Texas, Hybrid: 3 days in office (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)

What You’ll Do: 

Lead backend architecture and engineering across our flagship on-premises management appliance, evolving a large-scale Java codebase that handles distributed device configuration, policy compilation, health monitoring, and high-volume event ingestion. Modernize and modularize legacy subsystems within the Java EE / WildFly monolith: refactor tight couplings into clean, testable service boundaries and well-defined internal interfaces without disrupting customer upgrade paths or operational uptime. Own data tier architecture and performance across relational and analytical data stores (MariaDB, ColumnStore, RDS), including query optimization, connection pooling, transactional integrity, and automated schema migrations across release boundaries. Deliver cohesive full-stack capabilities, partnering backend APIs with modern web user interfaces (React, TypeScript) to provide responsive, enterprise-grade fleet management experiences. Design and evolve high-performance RESTful APIs alongside long-standing SOAP services, ensuring robust backward compatibility and interoperability between on-premises appliances, endpoints, and external management consumers. Progressively architect, build, and integrate companion cloud microservices (primarily Go, alongside Node.js and Python) on AWS using event-driven and serverless architectures (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, AWS IoT) to connect on-prem appliance fleets into the broader cloud platform.  Investigate and resolve high-complexity distributed systems failures, concurrency issues, memory leaks, thread contention, and performance bottlenecks across the stack using JVM profilers, database query analyzers, thread/heap dumps, and Linux system telemetry. Establish and champion AI-augmented software engineering practices: direct agentic coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code) on complex refactoring and feature tasks, set architectural guardrails, and mandate rigorous validation standards so AI velocity enhances codebase health. Architect resilience and fault tolerance into fleet-management subsystems, including high availability (HA), failover semantics, cluster replication, and disaster recovery. Author comprehensive automated test suites spanning JUnit backend unit/integration tests, Go testing packages, database test tiers, contract tests (Pact), and end-to-end browser workflows (Playwright), raising code quality across legacy and modern repositories.  Collaborate across organizational boundaries, partnering with architects, Product Management, QA, and Sustaining to scope technical initiatives, negotiate interface contracts, and align engineering roadmaps.  Mentor and elevate engineers across the organization through deep design reviews, high-leverage code reviews, architectural RFCs, and technical brownbags.

What You Should Have: 

Required: 

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and maintaining enterprise-grade production software, with significant depth in backend systems.
• Deep expertise in Java and the JVM ecosystem in large, multi-threaded, high-concurrency codebases (memory management, garbage collection tuning, thread safety, profiling).
• Solid experience with enterprise Java architectures (WildFly or comparable application servers; Java EE / Jakarta EE technologies such as EJBs, JPA, JMS, JAX-RS).
• Strong relational and analytical database architecture skills (MariaDB, MySQL, ColumnStore, or PostgreSQL): schema design, index optimization, complex query tuning, transaction management, and safe, zero-downtime migration strategies
• Proven full-stack capabilities: hands-on experience designing and implementing modern front-end applications (React, TypeScript, modern CSS/build tooling) alongside RESTful APIs.
• Experience designing and maintaining both RESTful APIs and SOAP-based service paradigms with strict backward-compatibility guarantees.
• Track record of successful refactoring in large, mature codebases: untangling legacy monoliths, introducing abstraction boundaries, and applying design patterns (e.g., strangler fig, clean architecture) without breaking backward compatibility.
• Solid Linux systems programming and networking fundamentals: POSIX concepts, process lifecycle, inter-process communication, sockets, TCP/IP, and diagnostic tooling.
• Demonstrated experience integrating agentic AI tools (such as Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot) into daily software development, with the engineering discipline to critically evaluate, verify, and test generated code before merge.
• High-caliber debugging and root-cause analysis skills across distributed systems, multi-threaded applications, and database-intensive workloads.
• Strong technical communication, writing, and leadership skills: experience authoring architecture design records (ADRs/RFCs), leading cross-functional design reviews, and mentoring senior and junior engineers.
• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degree welcome but not required.

Preferred:

• Experience building and operating cloud-native microservices on AWS using Go, Node.js, and serverless technologies (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, AWS IoT, CloudWatch)
• Domain experience in network security appliances or fleet management systems (firewalls, IPS/IDS, SIEM, security management consoles, network telemetry ingestion).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and cloud automation tooling (Terraform, Terragrunt, Serverless Framework).
•  Familiarity with event streaming, message brokers, or asynchronous processing architectures (JMS, Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS).
• Hands-on experience with modern test automation frameworks (Playwright, Vitest, Jest) and consumer-driven contract testing (Pact).
• Experience migrating legacy build, dependency, and CI/CD systems toward modern declarative pipelines. 
• Contributions to open-source software, internal architectural standards, or tech community leadership.
• Experience designing agentic or LLM-assisted operational workflows end to end: identifying candidate tasks, building the automation, and defining the guardrails that keep it safe in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment.
• Experience designing merge-queue or speculative-merge systems (GitHub Merge Queue, Bors, Mergify, or comparable) and automated flaky-test detection/quarantine that keep a shared branch continuously green without manual intervention.
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Terragrunt, CloudFormation, or comparable), useful for the microservices support scope.
• Container orchestration experience (Kubernetes or comparable) for deploying and operating microservices in staging or production.
• Experience owning or migrating artifact/container registries (e.g., Harbor, JFrog Artifactory, or comparable) at organization scale.
• Experience with the Serverless Framework or comparable (AWS Lambda, API Gateway) for microservice deployment automation.
• Experience leading or contributing to a CI/CD platform migration (e.g., Jenkins to GitHub Actions or another modern platform), including sequencing cutover so release branches stay protected throughout.

 Bonus eligibility: Eligible for the company-wide performance bonus.

Final pay within this range depends on factors including relevant work experience, skills, and certifications. 

What We Offer You: 

You’re important to us. What matters to you matters to us too. TrendAI provides benefit options for you and your family: 

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance 

• Life insurance 

• Short- and long-term disability 

• Prenatal, maternity, parental, and medical leave 

• Mental health wellness program 

• Adoption assistance 

• Wellness incentive 

• Pet insurance 

• 401(k) with company match 

• Paid time off 

• 14 annual holidays 

• Tuition assistance 

• Employee resource groups 

We offer competitive compensation with bonus opportunity tied to company performance, along with room to enhance your skills through ongoing learning and broad technological opportunities. Achieving work-life balance is a priority, complemented by team activities and an environment rooted in equity, inclusion, and collaboration, reflected in both our culture and our work. 

This role is not eligible for employer-provided work visa sponsorship, now or in the future. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States for this employer without sponsorship. 

Be Passionate. Be Innovative. Be a Trender. 

#LI-BM1

TrendAI (a business unit of Trend Micro Incorporated) provides equal employment opportunity to all applicants and employees and does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, pregnancy and childbirth or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, family care or medical leave status, veteran or military status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. 

TrendAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you need an accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, please contact allofnatalentteam@trendmicro.com.