Principal Backend Software Engineer

This role is based in Palo Alto, California, and follows a hybrid work model. If you’re excited about helping build a large-scale SaaS platform at an early-stage company and the qualifications below align with your background, we’d love to connect!

Endor Labs is building the Application Security platform for the software development revolution. Modern software is complex and dependency-rich, making it increasingly difficult to pinpoint the risks that truly matter. Endor Labs solves this challenge by building a call graph of your entire software estate—enabling teams to clearly identify, prioritize, and fix critical risks faster.

Trusted by companies that are one or one hundred years old, Endor Labs secures code whether it was written by humans or AI, and whether it's 40-year old C++ code or cutting edge Bazel Monorepos. Endor Labs was founded by serial entrepreneurs Varun Badhwar and Dimitri Stiliadis, and is backed by leading VC firms such as Dell Technology Capital, Lightspeed, and Sierra Ventures.

Sound interesting? Let’s talk if you want to be part of the next big leap in security innovation!

We are looking for a Principal Member of Technical Staff to join our engineering organization as a cross-cutting technical leader. This is a pure individual contributor role with significant architectural influence. You will work across teams to tackle our hardest backend scaling, reliability, and security product challenges.

As a Principal MTS, you will set technical direction, drive architecture evolution, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the organization. You will partner closely with engineering leadership, product, and other senior technologists to translate business and customer needs into scalable, high-performance systems.

This role is ideal for someone who has built and scaled security products before, thrives in a fast-paced startup environment, and has the rare combination of deep backend expertise and strong product instincts.

• Architect and evolve the core backend platform, including microservices, async processing pipelines, and data infrastructure.
• Drive technical strategy and make high-impact design decisions that affect the entire product and engineering organization.
• Design and build high-performance, reliable SaaS services that process security data at scale with low latency and high throughput.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives, collaborating with and through other senior engineers to ship complex features.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, and hands-on pairing.
• Partner with product leadership to shape the technical roadmap, balancing customer needs with long-term platform health.
• Identify and resolve systemic performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and technical debt across the stack.
• Contribute directly to code in Go, working within our Kubernetes-based infrastructure backed by MongoDB and Postgres.

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend focus. You have designed and built distributed systems, microservices architectures, and async workload processing at scale.
• Security product expertise. You have built or architected application security products before. Deep familiarity with App Sec, Dev Sec Ops , or software supply chain security is strongly preferred.
• Strong product sense. You understand how to build SaaS products that are performant, reliable, and solve real customer problems. You think beyond the code to the user experience and business impact.
• Proficiency in Go with production experience in Kubernetes, MongoDB, and/or PostgreSQL. Familiarity with React on the frontend is a plus.
• Technical leadership at scale. You have set technical direction for engineering organizations, driven architecture decisions, and worked effectively with and through other senior technical leaders.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You can motivate engineers, build consensus on technical approaches, and clearly articulate complex trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience as a founding…