The RoleThis is a senior backend software engineering role contributing directly to Operant's AI and Agentic security products. The primary focus is product engineering - roadmap features, system improvements, and shared product work alongside the rest of the engineering team. You also participate in the engineering on-call rotation and handle live debugging when customer-facing issues arise in your region.
You'll work closely with Operant's CTO, founding engineering team, and the Customer Success team for APAC, with significant autonomy across timezone gaps. This is a high-visibility role at a fast-moving AI security startup - a lean, high-caliber team where the autonomy is significant by design.
What You'll DoBackend Software Engineering- Design, build, review, and ship features powering Operant's products alongside the rest of the engineering team
- Own significant systems or components end-to-end - architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, operation
- Raise the technical bar through code review and contribute to architectural decisions on shared core systems
Technical Depth In-Region- Provide live debugging and engineering depth for strategic APAC customers during their business hours
- Participate in the engineering on-call rotation, with primary responsibility for customer-facing issues during APAC hours
- Ship contained fixes and small features independently; coordinate with US engineering on anything architectural or cross-cutting
- Make the call on what gets escalated to the US team overnight vs. waits for morning, and produce comprehensive async handoffs when escalating
Customer and Roadmap Partnership- Partner with the APAC Customer Success Team as their L2/L3 escalation path and technical partner
- Join key deployment milestones, architecture reviews, and QBRs/EBRs when product depth is required
- Translate field observations into product improvements; validate feasibility of regional feature requests and present synthesized feedback in the monthly product review
Operating Across Timezones- Operate with autonomy across a 12-14 hour gap from the US team, with disciplined async communication
- Available during overlapping hours with Pacific Standard Time (PST) for global engineering meetings and synchronous work with US-based leadership
What You'll BringRequired- 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 3 years at senior, staff, or principal level shipping production systems at scale
- Strong backend skills in one or more modern languages used in cloud infrastructure (Go, Rust, Python, or similar)
- Hands-on experience with on-call rotations and production incident response - debugging live customer-facing issues and shipping the underlying fixes
- Deep hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and container security across AWS, Azure, and GCP
- Strong working knowledge of runtime security, API security, CNAPP, or cloud workload protection
- Hands-on experience with at least one of: MCP, agentic AI platforms, LLM orchestration, or AI agent security - or strong evidence you can pick it up quickly
- Proven track record operating as a senior IC with significant autonomy - owning systems, making consequential technical decisions, and bringing others along through documentation and code review
- Experience working across timezones with disciplined async habits - clear written communication, escalation criteria, comprehensive handoffs
- Customer-facing technical experience - debugging live with customers and translating technical realities for senior security audiences
- Conversant with AI tooling and and harnessing AI products in a way that preserves a strong and reliable software engineering discipline
- Based in Bangalore, willing to travel across APAC for strategic customer engagements (10-20%)
- Available during overlapping hours with PST for regular synchronous work with the US team
Preferred- Background in operating production cloud systems at scale - strong operational instincts, monitoring, alerting, and reliability practices
- Prior experience at an early or growth-stage startup (Series A-C) where you've built engineering practices, not just executed them
- Hands-on with agentic AI frameworks - LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, or similar
- Background in offensive security, penetration testing, or red teaming
- Prior experience with self-hosted enterprise deployments at major accounts
Why Operant AI- Forefront of the industry - AI security is the defining enterprise challenge of this decade, and you'll be solving it as a core contributor to a leading platform
- Direct founder access - work closely with Operant's CTO and engineering leadership on the region's most strategic accounts and on the global product roadmap
- Early in APAC - join a growing regional team with outsized influence on how Operant operates engineering across timezones as we scale
- Lean team, outsized impact - tight, high-caliber team where your contributions are visible and your growth is real
- Real engineering, not field engineering - you ship to the shared product codebase, not to a customer-specific fork
- Competitive senior compensation - base salary, performance bonus, equity, and benefits benchmarked to Bangalore's senior technology market
