Principal Software Engineer

Big Ideas. Real People.

At Orca, in the right environment and with the right team, talent has no boundaries. This team spirit, together with our drive to always aim high, has quickly earned us unicorn status and turned us into a global cloud security innovation leader. So if you’re ready to join an amazing team of people who inspire each other every day, now is the time to find your place in our pod.

We’re looking for driven and talented people like you to join our CTO Office and our mission to change the future of cloud security. Ready to dive in and swim with our pod?

Highlights:

• High-growth: Over the past seven years, we’ve consistently achieved milestones that take other companies a decade or more. During this time, we’ve significantly grown our employee base, expanded our customer reach, and rapidly advanced our product capabilities.
• Disruptive innovation: Our founders saw that traditional security didn’t work for the cloud so they set out to carve a new path. We’re relentless pioneers who invented agentless technology and continue to be the most comprehensive and innovative cloud security company.
• Well-capitalized: With a valuation of $1.8 billion, Orca is a cybersecurity unicorn dominating the cloud security space. We’re backed by an impressive team of investors such as Capital G, ICONIQ, GGV, and SVCI, a syndicate of CISOs who invest their own money after conducting their due diligence.
• Respectful and transparent culture: Our executives pride themselves on being accessible to everyone and believe in sharing knowledge with the employees. Each employee has a place in shaping the future of our industry.

About the role:

We’re looking for a highly experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our CTO team in a cross-company, hands-on role. This position is focused on solving complex engineering challenges, driving architectural decisions, and actively contributing code across multiple teams and domains. You’ll work closely with senior engineers, architects, and leadership to improve platform scalability, reliability, and engineering practices, while remaining deeply involved in day-to-day development.

On a typical day you’ll:

• Take ownership of complex technical challenges across the platform, from design through production
• Design and evolve scalable, reliable architectures supporting high traffic and rapid growth
• Actively contribute code, prototypes, and reference implementations used by multiple teams
• Lead and participate in architecture and code reviews across the organization
• Improve engineering practices around CI/CD, testing, observability, and operational readiness
• Partner with infrastructure, security, and product teams to define and meet non-functional requirements
• Identify recurring technical gaps and build tools, libraries, or automation to address them
• Support incident analysis and guide long-term improvements in performance and reliability

About you:

• 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale, cloud-native or distributed systems
• Strong hands-on background with microservices, APIs, and modern backend architectures
• Proven ability to influence architecture and technical direction across multiple teams
• Comfortable writing production-grade code, debugging complex issues, and leading by example
• Strong understanding of system reliability, performance tuning, and operational best practices
• Clear communicator who can work effectively with engineers, leadership, and cross-functional partners
• Independent, proactive, and motivated by improving engineering quality at scale

If you enjoy working on hard technical problems, influencing engineering direction without people management, and staying deeply hands-on while operating at a broad organizational level, we’d love to talk.