Our Customer: A seed-stage technology company building a security layer for the era of AI agents. Their product is an MCP Gateway that intercepts and controls Model Context Protocol traffic, enforcing enterprise-grade security policies on AI tool calls. The team is moving from v0 to v1 and is looking for strong technical leadership on the core infrastructure.
Your Tasks: * Design and develop the core MCP gateway / proxy handling JSON-RPC 2.0 traffic over Streamable HTTP, WebSockets, and SSE; * Own connection lifecycle management: capability negotiation, authentication, routing; * Build and optimize high-throughput, low-latency request paths; * Implement TLS termination, connection pooling, backpressure handling; * Work closely with founders and early customers to evolve the system from prototype to production; * Take architectural ownership of the gateway core and policy enforcement layer.
Required Experience and Skills: * 5+ years of experience in systems or backend engineering with production-grade gateway/proxy systems; * Strong Python async expertise: asyncio, uvloop, FastAPI / Starlette at scale (5K+ concurrent connections); * Hands-on experience implementing network protocols: WebSockets, SSE, HTTP/2, gRPC; * Solid background in security engineering: TLS/mTLS, OAuth 2.1, request validation, rate limiting; * Cloud-native mindset: containers, IaC, CI/CD, monitoring and observability; * Ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between performance, security, and delivery speed. * English — Upper-Intermediate.
Would Be a Plus: * Production experience with AWS (networking, security services, deployments); * Rust experience (Tokio, Hyper, Tower) or interest in future migration; * Experience building or contributing to MCP servers or tooling; * Contributions to proxy/gateway projects such as Envoy, Kong, Traefik, or similar; * Startup experience and comfort working in high-ambiguity environments.
Working Conditions: * Remote work; * 5-day working week, 8-hour working day, flexible schedule; * All public holidays are days off; * Vacation and sick leave are covered by the company.
