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!
The RoleWe 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.
How You'll Make an Impact- 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.
What you Bring to the Table- 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 AppSec, DevSecOps, 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.
Bonus Points- Experience as a founding engineer or early-stage startup employee, where you built systems from zero to production.
- Track record of building and scaling developer-facing products or platforms.
- Background in startup environments with the scrappiness and ownership mindset that comes with it.
- Contributions to open-source security tooling or research.
CompensationFor candidates who receive an offer for this position, the compensation range is expected to be between $220,000 - $300,000. This may include additional incentives such as commission targets, restricted stock units, and/or bonuses, depending on the role.
