Principal Backend Software Engineer (Application Security)

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States; hybrid work model

Salary: $220,000–$300,000 per year, with potential additional incentives including commission targets, restricted stock units, and/or bonuses.

Company

Builds an application security platform that analyzes software dependencies and call graphs to identify, prioritize, and remediate critical risks across human- and AI-written codebases.

What you will do

• Architect and evolve the core backend platform, including microservices, asynchronous processing pipelines, and data infrastructure.
• Define technical strategy and make architecture decisions affecting the 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 and collaborate with senior engineers to deliver complex features.
• Mentor senior engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, and hands-on pairing.
• Identify and resolve systemic performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and technical debt while contributing code in Go.

Requirements

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend focus.
• Experience designing distributed systems, microservices architectures, and asynchronous workload processing at scale.
• Previous experience building or architecting application security products; familiarity with AppSec, DevSecOps, or software supply chain security is strongly preferred.
• Production proficiency in Go and experience with Kubernetes, MongoDB, and/or PostgreSQL.
• Experience setting technical direction, driving architecture decisions, and collaborating with senior technical leaders.
• Strong communication, collaboration, product judgment, and ability to explain complex technical trade-offs.

Nice to have

• Experience as a founding engineer or early-stage startup employee.
• Experience building and scaling developer-facing products or platforms.
• Contributions to open-source security tooling or research.
• Familiarity with React.

Culture & Benefits

• Work at the intersection of developer productivity and application security.
• Customer-focused environment emphasizing ownership, data-driven decisions, and rapid learning.
• Inclusive workplace committed to diversity and equal opportunity.
• Compensation may include commission targets, restricted stock units, and/or bonuses.