Senior Software Engineer

Backend Software Engineer — AI-Security Platform

Redwood City, CA | Hybrid (2-3 days in office)

Must hold existing US work authorisation — no sponsorship available

I’m retained by an existing client; a well‑backed, early‑stage security startup to find a strong backend engineer ready to take on genuinely complex technical challenges in a high‑ownership environment.

The business is solving a real and growing problem in enterprise cybersecurity, working with AI to do the heavy investigative lifting of internal threats that traditional security teams simply can’t do manually  founding team are seasoned operators who’ve led security at some of the world’s most recognisable technology companies globally. They know their problem area extremely well and have already achieved great success with their product.

Given their recent funding and success, they’re now looking for a Senior Engineer who has strong enough experience to know what matters and can ship at pace.

The engineering team is small (under 10) and the pace is fast. You won’t be waiting months to see your work in production as code ships on a weekly basis, so exposure to production is pretty immediate.

They’re looking for an engineer who enjoys working within ambiguity rather than someone who prefers clearly scoped support tickets and structure. The team is early stage, prioritises flexibility as problems evolve and priorities shift. They need someone who can spot what needs doing and doesn’t wait to be told to get on with it. If you can hold a technical conversation with a client as easily as you can review a pull request then this is absolutely a good sign.

The core of the engineering challenge here is connectivity and scale. The platform needs to pull signals from a huge number of enterprise tools, make sense of them in real time, and power AI‑driven workflows that security teams rely on daily.

In practice that means building and maintaining a large number of integrations with third‑party enterprise platforms, designing event‑driven data pipelines that process and correlate signals at volume, and working across a rich multi‑tenant data layer underpinning risk scoring and analytics.

(There’s also meaningful applied AI work for candidates interested in this area as the team are actively embedding LLM‑powered workflows into the product.)

On Go(lang) — if you’re not 100% proficient but come from a strong Python / TS background this will work (providing you’re happy to transition into Go!).

Beyond language, they’re looking for solid relational database knowledge, comfort with cloud infrastructure, and the ability to communicate technical thinking clearly to teammates and to customers.

Experience building against third‑party APIs, working with message‑driven architectures, or exposure to enterprise security tooling are all genuine advantages (whether that’s identity and access management platforms, endpoint protection solutions, cloud security tools, or SaaS monitoring products). You don’t need to have worked across all of these, but familiarity with how they work and how they expose data will accelerate your impact significantly.

There is some flexibility in certain technical requirements such as GCP experience (AWS/Azure are also fine), but the core idea is Redwood‑based Senior Engineer. If this appeals and you’d like to find out more, please apply and reach out to me directly to book in a qualifying call (no AI used!) – especially if you’re experienced on the enterprise security side of things too.