Principal Software Engineer (Autonomous Defense)

Join NodeZero as a Principal Software Engineer, where you'll lead the technical work for our defensive agents, translating proven attack paths into continuous actionable remediation. This role involves setting the technical direction, writing production code, and partnering closely with Product. You'll own the end-to-end technical vision, mentor engineers, and serve as the interface between AI research and platform engineering. Enjoy a flexible work environment, growth opportunities, and an inclusive team culture.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical work for NodeZero's defensive agents, setting direction alongside AI researchers and leading engineers in building the platform.
• Own the end-to-end technical vision for the workstream, from initial documentation through shipping, iterating, and deprecating.
• Make build vs. buy vs. integrate calls with business context, translating ambiguous product goals into concrete technical roadmaps.

Requirements

• 10+ yrs professional software engineering experience using modern object-oriented or functional languages (Python, Go, Scala, C++, TypeScript, etc)
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating distributed systems in production: asynchronous workflows, queues, retries, idempotency, and partial failure
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field
• Experience building applications on cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, using container technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• A track record of shipping and operating production services, including on-call ownership

Expert proficiency in SQL

• Deep experience with agentic or LLM-backed systems in production with a clear-eyed view of where they fail and how to contain it
• Experience with a durable execution (such as Temporal) or workflow engine or having built equivalent checkpointing yourself
• Experience building multi-tenant platforms with hard isolation requirements, workload identity, and short-lived credential brokering
• Experience integrating a long tail of third-party APIs behind a normalized abstraction
• Familiarity with security control planes and their APIs — EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender), firewalls, SIEM, cloud IAM
• Experience with database architectures including relational (PostgreSQL) and graph (Neo4j), and experience building GraphQL backends

Pay

USD 255,000 - 300,000