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 enforcement, routing with async connection pooling; * Build and optimize performance-critical request paths for high throughput and low latency; * Implement TLS/mTLS termination, connection pooling, and backpressure handling; * Support dynamic configuration updates (xDS-style) to enable zero-downtime deployments; * 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 programming or backend engineering with production-grade proxy/gateway systems; * Strong async programming background with hands-on experience building high-concurrency systems; * Solid Rust experience, including async ecosystem components such as Tokio, Hyper, Tower; * Hands-on experience implementing network protocols: WebSockets, SSE, HTTP/2, gRPC; * Strong security engineering background: TLS/mTLS, OAuth 2.1, JWT validation, 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 in a seed-stage environment; * English — Upper-Intermediate.
Would Be a Plus: * Production experience with AWS (networking, security services, deployments); * Experience with other systems languages (Go, C++); * Experience building or contributing to MCP servers or tooling; * Contributions to proxy/gateway projects such as Envoy, Kong, Traefik, Linkerd, or similar; * Experience with xDS protocol or Kubernetes Gateway API; * Startup experience and comfort working in high-ambiguity environments.
