Team Lead - Dataplane Engineering (Python / Go)

Team Lead - Dataplane Engineering (Python / Go)

Location: Poland or India

You'll lead a newly formed engineering team inside our dataplane organization. Its mandate is to extend what our segmentation engine can discover and enforce - new environments, new enforcement points, new integrations - while our core dataplane team keeps hardening the network segmentation our customers run today. The engine is distributed edge software - a Python core with Go sidecars - that runs as an on-prem virtual appliance and integrates with network switches and third-party security services.

You are the first hire on this team, and you set its culture. This is a player-coach role: you own delivery, you run intake with product management, you hire and grow the engineers who join you, and you still write production code. You will be paired with an in-house dataplane domain expert for onboarding - deep networking expertise is welcome but not required. What is required is that you have led engineers before and shipped software they built.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow a small engineering team: hire, mentor, set the quality bar, and give the hard feedback that keeps it there
• Own delivery end to end - from product ask to GA in production customer networks
• Run intake with product managers: turn ambiguous requests into a groomed, prioritized backlog with explicit priority tiers, and surface collisions early instead of absorbing them
• Stay hands-on: design and write production Python and Go alongside your team
• Partner with the core dataplane team and the cloud backend teams on boundaries and API contracts
• Take features from lab to GA: conformance testing, failure handling, rollout safety in environments we don't control

What We're Looking For

• You have led a software engineering team - as a team lead, tech lead, or engineering manager who still codes - and shipped production software through it
• You have hired, onboarded, and mentored engineers, and you can describe a hiring decision you got right and one you got wrong
• Strong hands-on Python and/or Go; you write production code today and review your team's
• Production ownership: you operate and debug what your team ships, and you build the tests and telemetry that make change safe
• You work directly with product management on scope and priority and can say no with a reason
• A high quality bar - you would rather ship less than ship badly

Nice to Have

• Networking fundamentals: L3/L4, flows and connection tracking, how firewalls and segmentation behave
• Breadth across infrastructure platforms beyond the network - virtualization, public cloud, Kubernetes - and their APIs and access models
• Working Java: the edge engine is Python and Go, but the cloud-side services it registers with and reports to are Java, and the strongest leads here take a feature end to end across both
• Prior work at a security or networking vendor, or shipping software that runs inside customer-controlled environments
• Having built a team from its first hire

Your First 90 Days

• The team's charter, intake path with product management, and priority tiers agreed with your director
• A groomed, prioritized backlog for your team's first mandate, with the first feature running in a customer-style lab
• A working map of the engine's internals - you know where your team's subsystems begin and end
• A hiring and onboarding plan for the engineers who will join you

How We Work

Small senior team, high trust, low ceremony. Our engineering culture prizes ownership (you run what you build), rigor (evidence over opinion), and patience (durable systems over quick hacks).

Apply Now

About Elisity

Elisity (www.elisity.com) is an identity-based microsegmentation company that helps enterprises stop lateral movement and contain breaches across IT, OT, and IoT environments. The Elisity platform discovers every device on an organization's network, enforces least-privilege access policies through existing network infrastructure, and delivers full microsegmentation in weeks - without agents, additional hardware, or network re-architecture. Elisity is trusted by Fortune 500 healthcare systems, global manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies including GSK, Main Line Health, Shaw Floors, and St. Luke's University Health Network. Founded in 2019, Elisity has a global employee footprint and a growing number of customers in the Fortune 500, and has achieved many awards, including Gartner Cool Vendor (2025), SINIT16 Innovator (2025), and Forrester Strong Performer (2024).