---
title: 'Staff Backend Engineer - Performance - US at Teleport'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/staff-backend-engineer-performance-us-teleport-united-states-rfhha24ynw9p'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Staff Backend Engineer - Performance - US at Teleport

- **Company:** Teleport
- **Location:** United States
- **Compensation:** $222k–$342k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/goteleport/543d88d2-7ca9-4762-9006-5ebd0d64ce05/application

**Skills:** Go, Linux systems engineering, Distributed systems, Identity Management, RBAC, ABAC, Zero-trust security models, Open Source contributions

> Join Teleport as a Senior Backend Engineer to design, develop, and ship scalable, reliable distributed systems in Go. You will focus on performance, security, and reliability while collaborating with customers and internal teams to solve complex infrastructure challenges.

## Job description

## About Teleport

Don't wait for the future of infrastructure. Be part of it. Teleport is the AI Infrastructure Identity Company. We're solving one of the hardest problems in security: giving every human, machine, workload, and AI agent a cryptographically secured identity, improving engineering velocity while maintaining security. We make trusted computing simple. This gives you the freedom, power, and autonomy to build and innovate with confidence. Remote-first and globally distributed, we work with companies like Nasdaq, DoorDash, and Elastic to secure infrastructure for an AI world.

## About the Role

We are looking for product-focused systems engineers to work on Teleport Core Product. You will work on problems ranging from performance and scalability, security and networking, to integrations with external systems. You will work on the full product lifecycle from working with customers to understand their problems, writing RFDs for your proposed design, implementing, testing, and documenting. Teleport is an open core project, and most of the code you will write will be open source and written in Go.

## What You'll do

- Become an expert on scalability, performance, and reliability of Teleport in large deployments.
- Design, develop, and ship outstanding, high-quality products.
- Write most of the code in Go.
- Closely collaborate with other teams at Teleport on matters related to scalability and performance.
- Work directly with our customers to diagnose and remediate performance issues.
- Grow your technical expertise.
- Lead a distributed team of outstanding engineers.

## What We're Looking For

- Willingness to work collaboratively with Teleport's engineers on [coding challenge in Go](https://github.com/gravitational/careers/blob/main/challenges/systems/challenge-1.md) as part of the interview process.
- Builder mentality and experience -- you love building zero-to-one products
- Extensive Go experience.
- Extensive experience developing scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems and platforms.
- Strong team leadership and management experience.
- Linux systems engineering experience.
- Knowledge of Identity Management, RBAC, ABAC, and zero-trust security models.
- Intellectual curiosity and a willingness to master new technologies.
- Transparency, honesty, and a no-ego mindset.
- Significant contributions in Open Source is a big plus.

## How We Hire

Our process is designed to be straightforward and respectful of your time. We skip performative rounds and focus on what matters: understanding how you think and what you can do. For this role, we use a take-home challenge that mirrors real work at Teleport — on your time, your way. You'll have support from the team throughout.

- Zoom meeting with a Teleport recruiter. You’ll learn about the company, our products, compensation philosophy, interview process, and key requirements.
- Zoom meeting with the Hiring Manager. The Hiring Manager will walk you through the coding challenge and answer your questions.
- Coding challenge collaboration. The day after your meeting with the Hiring Manager, you join a Slack channel and complete a [coding challenge in Go](https://github.com/gravitational/careers/blob/main/challenges/systems/challenge-1.md) using GitHub. The challenge usually takes about 2 weeks and ends with a Zoom meeting with the Hiring Manager and a member of the interview team to review your solution.
- If your challenge solution meets our bar, you'll receive an offer to join Teleport.

## Why Teleport

You're joining a company where the problem is real, the team is small, and your work shows up directly in the product. We're not a big company, you won't get lost in a crowd. You'll have the freedom and autonomy to do what you're great at, alongside teammates who care about doing it right and want to see you succeed. The work is collaborative, there's real room to grow, and the mission is one worth showing up for. Remote-first and globally distributed, we're genuinely passionate about what we're building.

The Benefits At Teleport, we believe your career is more important than a list of perks. That's why we focus on making your day-to-day the best it can be — giving you the autonomy, access, and support to do the best work of your career.

- Extensive health coverage
- Annual expense budget
- Rest and recovery policies that maximize your ability to recharge
- Investment in your future with retirement savings plans
- Professional development opportunities

Teleport is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any classifications protected by federal, state, or local law.

Candidate Privacy Notice: For information about our collection and processing of job applicant personal data for this position, please see our Job Applicant Privacy Policy and Notice of Collection at [goteleport.com/legal/apply/job-applicant/](http://goteleport.com/legal/apply/job-applicant/)

## About Teleport

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Teleport provides a unified identity layer for infrastructure, securing access for humans, machines, and AI agents with cryptographic identity and just-in-time privileges.
- **Entity Type**: Private (valued at US$1.1bn; venture-backed)
- **Headquarters**: Oakland, California, United States (global remote team)
- **Founded**: Not explicitly stated in provided sources (industry background suggests ~2015)
- **Founders**: Ev Kontsevoy (CEO), Alexander Klizhentas (CTO), Taylor Wakefield (COO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Infrastructure security, identity and access management (IAM), privileged access management (PAM)
- **Target customers**: Enterprise B2B – engineering, platform, and security teams at large organizations (e.g., NASDAQ, Bloomberg)
- **Mission/purpose**: “We make trusted computing simple” – modernizing identity, access, and policy for infrastructure to improve engineering velocity and resiliency against human factors and compromise.

## Products & Services
- **Teleport Infrastructure Identity Platform**: A unified identity layer that replaces SSH keys, VPNs, and static credentials with ephemeral, cryptographically-backed access. Supports SSH, Kubernetes, databases, web applications, and agentic AI workloads. Available as open-source and commercial SaaS/self-hosted.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: US$1.1bn (stated on Teleport’s benefits page) [goteleport.com/about/benefits](https://goteleport.com/about/benefits/)
- **Key Metric**: Over 600 enterprise customers; 5,000+ members in the open-source community [goteleport.com](https://goteleport.com/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: “Backed by leading investors” – specific names not listed in provided sources. Customers include NASDAQ and Bloomberg.
- **Growth Signals**: Fast-growing company with a 4.6/5 rating on Gartner Peer Reviews; claims 80% reduction in time spent troubleshooting access issues and 100% elimination of standing privileges for customers. Actively expanding into AI infrastructure identity (agentic control, LLMs, MCP tools).

## Competitive Advantages
- **No credentials to compromise**: Cryptographic identity rooted in hardware; no shared secrets or static credentials.
- **Ephemeral / just-in-time privileges**: Reduces attack surface by eliminating standing privilege.
- **Unified identity for humans, machines, and AI agents**: Fragmentation solved in one platform.
- **Strong open-source community**: 5,000+ contributors and community members, driving adoption and innovation.
- **Engineering-first design**: Built by engineers for engineers, with emphasis on simplicity and velocity.

## Strategic Focus
- **Contain and control agentic AI**: Extending identity and access control to AI agents, LLMs, and MCP tooling in production infrastructure.
- **Zero-trust infrastructure access**: Continued replacement of VPNs, jump boxes, and legacy PAM with a unified identity layer.
- **Global scaling**: Hiring top talent worldwide to support a growing customer base (NASSAQ, Bloomberg, etc.) and expanding use cases.

## Why Work Here
- **Equity for all employees**: Every role receives equity; current valuation $1.1bn with opportunities to release equity [goteleport.com/about/benefits](https://goteleport.com/about/benefits/)
- **Benefits**: Medical, dental, vision, mental health (Headspace), minimum 4 weeks annual leave, 12 weeks parental leave, $4,800 yearly wellness benefit, 401k matching, home office stipend, internet/phone allowance [goteleport.com/careers](https://goteleport.com/careers/)
- **Culture**:
  - Remote-first / global; headquarters in Oakland but employees worldwide
  - Senior, autonomous team – “we only hire the smartest people in security”
  - Behaviors: builders, start simple and iterate, value each other’s time, assume charity, be drivers not passengers [goteleport.com/careers/culture](https://goteleport.com/careers/culture/)
  - Interview process: no live coding or whiteboarding; work-sample-based assessments
- **Engineering culture**: Designed by engineers for engineers; strong focus on open source, security, and solving complex infrastructure problems.

## Sources
1. [goteleport.com](https://goteleport.com/) – Homepage and product overview
2. [goteleport.com/about](https://goteleport.com/about/) – About page (founders, headquarters, culture)
3. [goteleport.com/careers](https://goteleport.com/careers/) – Careers page (benefits, equity, work environment)
4. [goteleport.com/careers/culture](https://goteleport.com/careers/culture/) – Culture page (behaviors, hiring philosophy)
5. [goteleport.com/about/benefits](https://goteleport.com/about/benefits/) – Benefits page (valuation, equity details, perks)

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