Sr. Engineer - Cloud Backend; Hybrid; Sunnyvale

Full Stack Backend Engineer

This is a full stack backend engineering position on the Spotlight platform team. You will design, build, and operate the cloud-native services and infrastructure that power Crowd Strike's endpoint vulnerability assessment capabilities at global scale. This role requires a strong focus on distributed systems, service reliability, scalability, and cloud architecture across AWS and GCP.

This role also requires reasoning and judgment over large volumes of continuously changing data, at the scale Crowd Strike operates — work that conventional rule-based systems have only partially addressed. We're treating agentic reasoning as a core architectural element rather than a feature layered onto an existing system, which means real decisions are still open: where reasoning belongs, where determinism is the better answer, and how to make either hold up in production.

Falcon Vulnerability Assessment is the industry's first scan-less endpoint vulnerability assessment solution, delivering real-time, zero-impact assessments of endpoint security posture. Falcon Vulnerabiity Assessment adds preparation and readiness to the unparalleled prevention, detection and response provided by the Falcon platform, resulting in a stronger security posture and unprecedented breach protection.

Crowd Strike Falcon is a two-component security product. One component is a "sensor", which is a lightweight agent installed on client machines that observes system activity and recognizes malicious behavior, then provides on-box prevention capability and remote telemetry to the Falcon cloud. The cloud component aggregates sensor telemetry for each customer's network, can correlate malicious behavior across multiple machines, and presents our customers' operations teams with a prioritized summary of the threats detected in their environments.

What You'll Do:

• Design and build high-throughput, low-latency backend services and APIs in Golang and Python
• Architect and operate cloud-native infrastructure across AWS and GCP at scale (S3, SQS, Kubernetes/KEDA, and more)
• Build and maintain Kafka-based event streaming pipelines for near-real-time vulnerability event processing
• Drive backend engineering and process automation across the platform
• Partner with security researchers and platform teams (Intel, EPP) to deliver integrated capabilities
• Own service reliability — performance profiling, incident response, and root cause analysis on time-sensitive production issues
• Continuously re-engineer for improved architecture, performance, and stability
• Write high-quality, well-tested, production-ready code with a focus on observability and operability
• Build agentic capabilities into the product — systems that reason over real data, use tools, and produce explainable results customers can act on
• Take AI capabilities from prototype to production, owning latency, cost, correctness, and evaluation
• Design the guardrails and policies that make autonomous reasoning safe for enterprise customers

What You'll Need:

• 8-12 years of backend engineering experience.
• Solid experience with Golang/Java in production systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud services (S3, SQS, and similar)
• Experience with Kafka or other event streaming platforms.
• Strong database skills — Cassandra, Elasticsearch/Open Search, Redis, or similar distributed data stores.
• Hands-on use of frontier-model SDKs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar) and AI-assisted development tools, with a realistic view of their capabilities and limits.
• Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance decision-making, streamline workflows and processes, improve efficiency and drive business outcomes.
• Ability to communicate effectively at all levels of an organization
• Strong collaboration skills and experience working in a global team
• Commitment to software quality — unit tested, code reviewed, and continuously integrated

Bonus Points:

• Experience in cybersecurity — welcome, though not required
• Experience with Kubernetes and event-driven autoscaling (KEDA)
• Experience with observability tooling (Splunk, Grafana, Log Scale, or similar)
• Familiarity with security vulnerability management or cybersecurity platforms
• Good understanding of Windows OS internals and the Windows API
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, or similar)
• Prior experience with large-scale data acquisition or content pipeline systems
• Experience with evaluation and observability tooling for agentic systems
• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector stores, or retrieval-augmented agents
• Experience with graph databases and complex data modeling