Product Engineer, Working Student (m/f/d)

NeoProtect delivers DDoS protection as rentable software instances via our On Premise Shield and with that protects Terabits of legitimate traffic every second. Additionally, we also have our Game Shield where we protect Game Servers from DDoS attacks via a globally distributed network of proxy services.

As a software developer you work across the platform, from high-performance packet filtering on Linux to the web dashboards customers use to monitor and control their protection.

Nobody is expected to know everything in its entirety. We expect you to go deep in one or two of the areas below and to be comfortable reading code in the others.

What you’d work on

• Direct customer contact: By Handling primarily feature requests, complex debugging and problem solving tickets, you ensure that NeoProtect continuously meets fast turnarounds and fixes problems when they occurred only once
• Packet filtering: high-performance filters that inspect and drop attack traffic before it reaches the services behind them.
  • Skills: C and eBPF/XDP, writing code the kernel verifier accepts, integrating kernel programs with Go, testing across kernel versions
• Game and application protection: proxies and verification services that keep game servers and online applications reachable during attacks.
  • Skills: high-throughput, low-latency network servers in Go, binary protocols, rate limiting, TLS
• Detection and mitigation: services that recognize attacks in network traffic and trigger the right response automatically.
  • Skills: Go, stream processing, time-series data, BGP, spotting anomalies in traffic
• Platform backend: the services behind customer accounts, billing and support.
  • Skills: modern Java and Spring Boot, PostgreSQL and relational data modeling, authentication and authorization (OAuth2), automated testing
• Web: customer dashboards, our website and documentation.
  • Skills: TypeScript and React, modern routing, data-fetching and form libraries, Tailwind CSS or similar

Core skills

Every developer needs a solid base in Linux, networking and at least one of our main languages, plus the skills listed for their area above. Most of our services are written in Go; the platform backend uses Java and the web uses TypeScript.

• Good written communication skills: Coding is not everything. Handling real problems sometimes requires your input for customers.
• Production code: experience in at least one of Go, Java or TypeScript, including concurrency, profiling and testing
• Linux: comfortable on servers and the command line, including debugging live systems
• Networking fundamentals: how IP, TCP, UDP, TLS work etc. (more under Domain knowledge)
• APIs and messaging: gRPC, REST and event-driven systems
• Databases: relational schema design, migrations and query tuning, ideally with PostgreSQL
• Containers and CI/CD: Docker and automated build and release pipelines
• Observability: metrics, dashboards and structured logging (example tools: Grafana)
• Git and code review

Industry knowledge

You should know some of them on day one and want to learn the rest with us.

• DDoS attack types: volumetric floods, reflection and amplification, protocol attacks, application-layer and bot traffic, and how each is mitigated
• Packet-level networking: Ethernet, IPv4 and IPv6 headers, tunneling, MTU/MSS handling
• TCP internals: the handshake, SYN cookies, connection tracking
• Flow telemetry: sFlow, NetFlow and IPFIX, commonly used tools
• Routing: BGP, Multi-AFI environments (e.g. with FlowSpec)
• Bot and abuse concepts: CRA, rate limiting, traffic fingerprinting
• Game and real-time protocols: popular game server protocols

Nice to have

• Building with LLMs: retrieval-augmented generation, tool-using agents, model APIs
• Cloud and edge: a major cloud provider and edge or CDN platforms
• Identity and security: OpenID Connect, passkeys, two-factor authentication, applied cryptography
• Data at scale: time-series databases, object storage, vector search
• Payments: integrating payment providers
• Low-level performance: C, beyond eBPF
• Hands-on operations: running servers or networks for a hosting company, ISP or game community
• Writing docs: developer documentation and API specifications

Usually the lines are not clear, but same goes for our projects :)

How we work

• Weekly sprints, with a Scrum-like approach
• Linear to track development work; with integrations to ensure automatable work is not done manually
• What can be automated should be
• We make mistakes. But we shouldn’t make the same one twice.
• We require good code and structure, as well with AI

We generally work on each’s own time and like to debug and discuss in calls. There are not many recurring meetings.