Distributed Proxy Network (Networking / Backend)

We’re building a consent-based residential & mobile proxy network — a platform where users opt in to share spare bandwidth and earn for it, and businesses access that pool through a clean API for legitimate use cases (data collection, ad verification, market research, brand protection).

You’ll build the technical core: the peer client, the routing/tunneling layer, and the gateway that ties them together. This is deep distributed-networking work, not a typical web app. If reverse tunnels, SOCKS5, and CGNAT sound like fun rather than jargon, read on.

What you’ll build

    •    The gateway / control plane: accepts buyer requests and routes them to live peers matching a requested geo, while tracking peer health across many thousands of persistent connections.

    •    The reverse-tunneling layer: peers behind home routers and carrier NAT dial outward and hold connections open; you route buyer traffic back down those tunnels. This is the heart of the system.

    •    The peer client: a lightweight, transparent agent (desktop daemon and/or mobile app) that meters bandwidth, respects data caps, and gives users full control.

    •    Usage metering & billing that’s accurate enough to bill buyers and pay suppliers off the same numbers.

    •    Abuse prevention baked in from day one — buyer KYC, traffic filtering, and payout-side fraud detection.

What we’re looking for

Must have

    •    Strong systems / backend engineering, ideally in Go or Rust, with real concurrency experience (you’ve handled many thousands of simultaneous connections, or are clearly ready to).

    •    Deep networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, HTTP(S), TLS, DNS, and hands-on familiarity with SOCKS5 / HTTP CONNECT proxy protocols.

    •    Practical understanding of NAT / CGNAT and NAT-traversal / reverse-tunneling techniques (WebSockets, gRPC streams, or custom protocols).

Nice to have

    •    Mobile (Kotlin/Swift) or desktop client experience, especially battling OS background-execution limits.

    •    Experience with proxy/VPN/CDN/P2P infrastructure or any high-throughput networked product.

    •    DevOps at connection scale (observability, autoscaling) and exposure to billing or marketplace systems.