Software Engineer; Backend​/Distributed Systems

Staff Software Engineer (Backend / Distributed Systems)

Location:

San Francisco, CA

On-site role requiring five days per week in the office in San Francisco.

Compensation: $250,000 – $300,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa:
Open to visa transfers, including H-1B transfers and OPT. No additional visa sponsorship details provided.

Company Stage:
Seed / Early-Stage Technology Company

Industry: Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, Identity Security, SaaS, Cloud Security, Enterprise Software, AI/ML, Identity Threat Detection

About the Company:

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.

• 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

• 5–8 years of backend or distributed systems…