Opal Security - Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Opal Security:
Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Type: Full-time | Hybrid | San Francisco, CA
Compensation: $160,000–$250,000 (up to ~$260,000 for exceptional candidates) + competitive equity
Hiring count: 1–2 (potential for a 3rd)
Visa sponsorship: Yes, case by case. Open to transfers (e.g. OPT, H-1B transfers)
Reports to: CTO (reporting line may shift with incoming engineering leadership)
Hiring Manager: Eleanor Johnson

Opal Security builds modern identity governance for the AI era: an AI-native authorization control plane that lets enterprises manage access for employees, contractors, service accounts, and AI agents. Security and engineering teams use Opal to govern access at scale without slowing down. Trusted by hypergrowth startups and the Fortune 500, including Databricks and Figma.

Founded: 2020 | Team size: ~60 | Total funding: $34MIndustry: Cybersecurity, Security, AI, B2B, Enterprise Backed by:
Greylock, Battery Ventures, Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI)
Website:(Use the "Apply for this Job" box below). Offices:
San Francisco, CA and New York City

• High impact at a lean company: Opal keeps teams small on purpose, so each engineer owns meaningful chunks of the platform and ships work that reaches Fortune 500 customers and top startups like Databricks and Figma.
• Senior, elite platform team: the team includes ex-Meta and ex-Google senior engineers plus proven startup builders, operating with real ownership and autonomy.
• Identity security is having a moment: as every company deploys AI agents and service accounts, legacy IAM cannot keep up, and Opal is building the control plane for it.
• Direct customer exposure: no CS layer filters feedback; engineers talk directly to enterprise security and eng teams and own the problem end to end.
• Strong comp plus meaningful equity upside at a company with clear momentum and top-tier investors.

• Role reports to the CTO today; the reporting line may shift with new engineering leadership.
• Platform team is staffed with senior engineers from Meta, Google, and successful startups.
• Must be a software engineer who works on infrastructure; coding ability is critical (not a traditional SRE/Dev Ops hire).
• 4+ years of experience; familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes, Kafka expected (baseline, not deep expertise).
• Strong SWE fundamentals are the core bar; the coding screen is the same one product engineers take.
• Interviews do not specifically test Terraform/Kubernetes, but candidates should understand them.
• Hybrid: 3 to 4 days in office, with flexibility for exceptional remote candidates.
• Visa sponsorship available on a case-by-case basis.
• Comp: $160K to $250K, possibly up to $260K, plus competitive equity.
• Interview flow: recruiter screen, coding screen, on-site (system design + infra deep dive), CTO and CEO meetings, final CEO sign-off.
• Culture: all engineers interact with customers; seeking committed people ready for high impact on a lean team.
• Ideal profile: systems-at-scale experience, preferably Google/Facebook tier, ideally big tech followed by a startup chapter.
• Timeline: hiring 1 to 2 now (maybe 3 later); existing pipeline, urgency to fill.
• Pain points: needs reputable prior experience; struggles with candidates from large orgs who lack SWE depth.

Own the stability, security, scalability, and performance of Opal's platform serving Fortune 500 enterprises, while empowering product engineers to ship quickly.

• Ensure stability, security, scalability, and performance of the platform serving Fortune 500 enterprises.
• Take ownership of critical infrastructure components and drive architectural decisions with high autonomy.
• Build the tools, systems, and best practices product engineers rely on to ship quickly.
• Work with leadership, product, and other engineers on roadmap, architecture, and product decisions.
• Interact directly with enterprise customers on product feedback and infrastructure issues.
• Create and improve engineering best practices across the platform team.

Tech stack: Kubernetes, Golang, PostgreSQL, Redis, Terraform, GraphQL, Type Script, React, AWS, GCP, Kafka

Seniority

• 4+ years of experience as a software engineer building distributed systems [Required]

Work Experience

• Worked on platform/infrastructure teams as a software engineer, writing services and systems, not just managing or operating infrastructure [Must have]
• Built or scaled systems serving enterprise-grade traffic or multi-tenant SaaS [Required]
• Experience building internal developer platforms or tooling that product engineers depend on [Strongly preferred]

Hard Skills

• Strong software engineering fundamentals; must pass a rigorous Leetcode-style coding screen (same bar as product engineers) [Must have]
• Systems design for large distributed systems (a dedicated interview round tests this) [Must have]
• Backend development in Golang or a comparable systems language [Required]
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP): deployment, scaling, and monitoring at…