Staff Software Engineer (Backend / Distributed Systems)

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is building an AI-powered cybersecurity platform focused on protecting businesses from account compromise and identity-based cyberattacks. The company's platform helps detect compromised accounts in real time, identify suspicious user behavior, and automatically respond to threats before they can cause significant business damage. The product is purpose-built for organizations managing Microsoft 365 environments and provides automated identity threat detection and response capabilities for managed service providers and their customers. The company has achieved strong early product-market fit and is scaling rapidly, protecting more than 1.6 million users across thousands of businesses. The engineering organization is intentionally small and high-caliber, creating an environment where engineers have significant ownership over core infrastructure and product systems. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll work directly with the founding team to design and scale the backend and distributed systems powering the company's real-time detection platform. This is a high-ownership role where you'll be expected to build production systems, establish engineering patterns, solve difficult scaling problems, and raise the technical bar across the organization. The ideal candidate combines strong backend and distributed systems expertise with experience building production software at scale, strong technical judgment, and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving startup environment.

Requirements

5–8 years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience
Strong backend software engineering background
Experience designing and building distributed systems
Experience building production systems at meaningful scale
Experience owning critical infrastructure or backend systems end-to-end
Strong software engineering fundamentals
Strong system design capabilities
Experience making architecture decisions independently
Ability to operate with significant autonomy
Demonstrated ability to raise engineering quality and technical standards
Experience working on zero-to-one products or infrastructure
Strong backend engineering fundamentals
Strong distributed systems expertise
Strong system design skills
Experience designing scalable backend architectures
Experience building high-throughput systems
Experience with real-time data processing
Strong understanding of APIs and backend services
Strong understanding of data modeling and storage systems
Experience designing reliable and fault-tolerant systems
Experience optimizing backend performance
Experience working with production cloud infrastructure
Strong understanding of scalability and system reliability
Strong understanding of software architecture and technical tradeoffs
Strong debugging and technical problem-solving ability
Experience working with observability and production monitoring
Experience designing systems for high availability
Ability to reason about latency, throughput, reliability, and scale
Ability to build maintainable and production-grade software
Experience working with modern backend technologies
Familiarity with Node.js and TypeScript
Familiarity with Python
Experience working with data-intensive applications
Ability to evaluate and improve technical architecture
Strong code review and engineering quality instincts
Strong technical ownership
High autonomy
Strong engineering judgment
Excellent problem-solving ability
High attention to technical quality
Strong communication skills
Ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly
Comfortable working directly with founders
Strong cross-functional collaboration
Low-ego and feedback-oriented
Comfortable giving and receiving direct feedback
Ability to raise the technical bar across a team
Comfortable operating in ambiguity
Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
Strong sense of accountability
Bias toward action
High execution ability
Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment
Ability to balance speed with reliability and engineering quality
Strong product awareness
Ability to connect technical decisions to business impact
Comfortable working in a high-output environment
Willingness to work from the San Francisco office five days per week
Excited by cybersecurity and identity security problems
Motivated by technically challenging infrastructure problems

Nice To Haves

Experience working in fast-moving startup environments preferred
Experience working on high-growth technology products preferred
Experience shipping production AI/ML-integrated systems preferred
Experience working on security, identity, infrastructure, or data-intensive systems preferred
Experience working on real-time systems preferred
Experience solving complex technical and scaling challenges
Experience working closely with founders or senior technical leadership
Experience working on zero-to-one products or infrastructure
Experience mentoring or technically guiding other engineers
Experience with AI/ML-integrated backend systems preferred
Experience building production ML/AI systems preferred
Experience working with security or identity systems preferred
Bachelor's degree preferred
Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical discipline preferred
Strong technical academic background is a plus
Equivalent professional engineering experience may compensate for academic pedigree
Strong technical achievements or demonstrated engineering excellence are highly valued
Strong mentoring instincts

Responsibilities

Design and build backend systems responsible for detecting account compromise in real time
Build systems spanning signal ingestion, behavioral analysis, and AI-powered decisioning
Architect scalable distributed systems capable of supporting significant growth
Design infrastructure to support 10–100x scale growth over the next several months
Build and ship ML- and AI-integrated systems into production
Develop reliable backend services supporting real-time security detection
Design high-throughput systems for processing security and behavioral signals
Build systems that analyze large volumes of identity and security data
Improve reliability, scalability, performance, and maintainability across backend systems
Establish engineering patterns and technical standards across the team
Raise the technical bar through architecture, code reviews, and engineering practices
Work directly with founders on the core detection platform
Make architecture decisions that directly influence the company's technical direction
Own critical infrastructure from design through production deployment
Solve complex distributed systems and backend engineering problems
Develop APIs and services supporting security detection workflows
Integrate AI/ML capabilities into production backend systems
Build reliable infrastructure for real-time decision-making
Work on systems requiring high availability and low-latency processing
Identify bottlenecks and optimize system performance
Design systems that can scale with rapidly increasing customer and user volume
Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams
Help establish development and operational best practices
Mentor engineers and contribute to the technical growth of the organization
Operate with significant autonomy in a rapidly growing startup
Help evolve the platform as the company scales
Balance engineering quality, speed, reliability, and product requirements
Contribute to zero-to-one technical initiatives
Take ownership of ambiguous and technically challenging engineering problems