Senior Backend Engineer

About the Role

• We are a stealth-stage defense technology company building at the intersection of cybersecurity, open-source intelligence, and generative AI. Our platform transforms vast, unstructured digital environments into actionable intelligence for the operators who depend on it.
• We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join the founding core team and assume end-to-end ownership of our core backend and infrastructure. The successful candidate will architect the systems that bridge AI-driven logic with the low-latency, high-availability infrastructure required to operate across elite cloud environments and sensitive on-premise deployments.
• This is a foundational, high-trust role. You will set the technical direction for the backend, define the deployment strategy across hybrid environments, and shape our approach to security, reliability, and engineering culture from the outset.

What You Will Do

• Architect and implement scalable Python and Go microservices that form the backbone of our OSINT engine, with explicit attention to service boundaries, contracts, and evolvability
• Design and operate event-driven state machines and long-running workflows
• Own the integration of self-hosted models — HuggingFace LLMs, embeddings, and diffusion pipelines — into high-throughput production paths
• Define and own our CI/CD platform end-to-end in Git Actions, with strong emphasis on automation, security, and deployment integrity
• Lead design reviews, mentor mid-level engineers, and set the standard for code quality, observability, and operational excellence
• Define SLOs, on-call practices, and incident response patterns, and participate in and lead on-call rotations as the platform matures
• Partner with security, AI, and product engineers to make security, latency, and sovereignty-aware decisions

What We Are Looking For

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience (excluding military service), with a demonstrated record of delivering and operating production-grade distributed systems
• Deep proficiency in Python (FastAPI, Pydantic, Celery) and working production fluency in Go
• Production-grade Docker and Kubernetes experience: multi-cluster operation, container networking, persistent storage, secrets management, and ingress
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating across both GCP and on-premise infrastructure, including bare-metal Linux and mixed Linux/Windows targets (PowerShell scripting is a plus)
• Strong architectural fluency in distributed systems: event-driven design, idempotency, and asynchronous coordination
• Deep familiarity with Redis at scale (Valkey or KeyDB awareness welcome) and with at least one vector database — Weaviate preferred, or Chroma, Pinecone, Milvus, or Qdrant
• A security-first engineering philosophy and working knowledge of cybersecurity principles
• Strong observability instincts — Grafana, Loki, Promtail, Prometheus — and a habit of operating what you build
• Excellent written communication and design judgment; capable of owning ambiguous, high-stakes decisions and documenting them with clarity

Nice to Have

• Production experience with self-hosted HuggingFace models and diffusion-model pipelines
• A background in data engineering or high-volume data pipeline construction
• Proficiency with React and TypeScript for occasional full-stack contributions
• Familiarity with Datadog or other commercial observability platforms
• A background in defense, intelligence, national security, cyber operations, or a related regulated domain — through prior employment, academic work, or service in a technical military or government unit
• Prior founding-engineer or early-stage experience

What You Will Get

A founding-team seat with full ownership of the technology stack, architecture, and engineering culture. The role offers significant technical complexity, substantial autonomy, and the opportunity to shape a product of genuine consequence in the global security landscape. We offer a highly competitive salary, meaningful founder-level equity, and the resources required to build the team and infrastructure you need.

To apply, please message us directly on LinkedIn.