Software Dev Principal Engineer - DPI & SSL/TLS Security

For more than 30 years, SonicWall has delivered a partner-first unified cybersecurity portfolio that helps SMBs, MSPs, and IT teams consolidate network security, endpoint security, security service edge (SSE), and threat response across hybrid environments. By bringing connected technology, real-time threat intelligence, automation, and expert services together, SonicWall helps organizations simplify security operations, achieve better security outcomes, and lower total cost of ownership. Backed by a global ecosystem of more than 17,000 partners, SonicWall delivers enterprise-grade protection built for SMB and mid-market realities.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and development of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and SSL/TLS Decryption engines for our NGFW appliance and virtual firewall product lines. You will drive the design of high-throughput L7 inspection and threat prevention capabilities — including Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, IPS, Content Filtering, and Application Control — at scale across 10G–100G+ deployments.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the DPI engine for multi-gigabit stream-based L7 traffic inspection on NGFW appliances.
• Lead design of the SSL/TLS decryption pipeline to enable security services inspection over encrypted traffic.
• Define integration strategy between the decryption layer and downstream security services (AV, IPS, Anti-Spyware, Content Filtering, Application Control).
• Drive hardware acceleration strategy for cryptographic and pattern-matching workloads.
• Champion security hardening practices and ensure compliance with modern cryptographic standards.
• Own architecture reviews, author technical specifications, define performance benchmarks, and mentor senior engineers.

Requirements

• 10+ years of C/C++ experience in high-performance networking, packet processing, or L7 security engines on NGFW or carrier-grade platforms.
• Strong expertise in SSL/TLS internals — TLS 1.2/1.3, PKI, certificate management, and OpenSSL/BoringSSL.
• Hands-on experience building or optimizing DPI or security service engines (AV, IPS, Content Filtering, or Application Control) on commercial NGFW platforms.
• Proficiency in multi-core, low-latency C/C++ programming — concurrency, memory optimization, and zero-copy techniques.
• Strong debugging and profiling skills across complex, multi-threaded networking environments.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with NGFW security services from leading industry vendors.
• Exposure to modern encrypted protocol standards (HTTP/3, QUIC, DoH, ECH/ESNI).
• Experience with virtual or cloud firewall performance tuning.
• Hands-on with network traffic generation and testing tools (Spirent, IXIA, TRex).

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