What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Software Engineer - Agent Platform position at Dragos, Inc.?
Dragos is on a relentless mission to defend industrial organizations that provide us with the necessities of modern civilization; running water, functioning electricity, and safe industrial working environments. As the market leader in ICS/OT Cybersecurity, we are dedicated to arming our customers with best-in-class technology, threat intelligence, and services to protect their systems as effectively and efficiently as possible. We're a remote-first culture with operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC. We're looking for mission-oriented teammates who embody our core values of authenticity, transparency, and trust. Are you ready to make a difference? Come join a mission that can save the world!
About the Role:
Dragos is seeking aStaff Software Engineerto join ourActive Collectionteam, which builds and maintains the agents responsible for collecting system information from industrial environments. These agents actively probe devices for system information, installed software, and configurations using a variety of protocols, and securely beacon that data back to the Dragos Platform for ingestion and analysis.
In this role, you will lead the evolution of our agent ecosystem-enhancing existing capabilities, expanding support for new protocols, and improving the robustness of communication and tasking systems. You'll also contribute to the platform-side orchestration of agents, including task distribution, configuration management, and operational telemetry. Our agents and build systems are primarily developed inNode.js, and deployed across containerized environments usingDockerandKubernetes, so deep experience with these technologies is essential.
This is a high-impact role that blends systems programming, protocol engineering, and cloud-native infrastructure to support Dragos' mission of protecting industrial organizations from cyber threats.
Responsibilities:
- Design and implement enhancements to existing Linux and Windows agents that actively collect system and software information from industrial devices.
- Expand agent capabilities to support new protocols and data sources, including both standard (e.g., WMI, SNMP, SSH, HTTP) and proprietary ICS protocols.
- Improve the robustness, reliability, and security of agent communication mechanisms, including beaconing, tasking, and telemetry delivery.
- Participate in the design and implementation of agent update mechanisms, configuration management, and operational telemetry.
- Develop and maintain platform-side components responsible for agent orchestration, task distribution, and data ingestion.
- Collaborate with platform and infrastructure teams to ensure scalable and secure deployment of agents across diverse customer environments.
- Lead efforts to optimize agent performance and footprint, especially in resource-constrained or sensitive industrial environments.
- Work closely with threat intelligence and product teams to identify high-value data collection targets and implement corresponding agent features.
- Mentor other engineers in systems programming, protocol development, and secure software practices.
- Contribute to technical design reviews, testing strategies, and deployment pipelines to maintain high engineering standards.
Qualifications:
- 7 years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years focused on systems programming inNode.js,C/C ,Rust, orGo.
- Deep understanding of Windows and Linux internals, including system calls, process management, and file systems.
- Experience developing and debugging low-level binaries and agents for telemetry collection.
- Strong knowledge of network and system protocols (e.g., WMI, SMB, SSH, SNMP, Modbus, OPC, etc.).
- Familiarity with secure communication and data serialization formats (e.g., TLS, protobuf, JSON).
- Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies such asDockerandKubernetes.
- Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and mentor junior engineers.
- Experience incorporating AI tools, models, or services into development workflows-whether for code generation, testing, optimization, or product features.
- Experience working in cybersecurity, ICS/OT environments, or other mission-critical domains is a strong plus.
- Comfortable working in a remote-first, fast-paced, and mission-driven environment.
Compensation:
- Salary: $192,000
- Competitive Equity Package
- Comprehensive Benefits Plan
#LI-NH1 #LI-REMOTE
Dragos is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics, or any other basis forbidden under federal, state, or local laws. All new hires must pass a background check as a condition of employment.
Dragos is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce. Come join us!