Cortex Cloud Application Security (AppSec) is building the security platform for the modern software development lifecycle. We help organizations identify, prioritize, and prevent security risks across source code, open-source dependencies, infrastructure as code, secrets, container images, CI/CD pipelines, and the broader developer ecosystem.
At the heart of AppSec is a large-scale platform responsible for connecting to customers' development environments, collecting and processing massive amounts of data, and making it reliably available to security products and experiences across Cortex Cloud.
We are looking for an exceptional Senior / Principal Backend Engineer to join our AppSec Platform group, reporting directly to the Group Leader.
This is a highly autonomous, hands-on role for an engineer who wants broad technical ownership rather than a narrowly defined domain. You will work on some of AppSec's most important and challenging engineering problems - spanning high-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, onboarding and integrations, developer experience, reliability, performance, and AI-driven engineering.
You will frequently operate across team boundaries, take ambiguous problems from idea to production, and lead technical initiatives that have an impact well beyond a single service or team.
We are looking for someone who combines deep backend expertise with strong execution: an engineer who can design the architecture, dive into the code, debug production systems, challenge existing assumptions, rapidly prototype new approaches, and bring others along with them.
Key Responsibilities
Lead Critical Initiatives End-to-End - Own complex, business-critical engineering efforts from problem definition and architecture through implementation and production, often spanning multiple teams and domains.
Build and Scale the Backbone of AppSec - Design and evolve distributed systems and data infrastructure supporting large enterprise environments and hundreds of millions of entities, while balancing scalability, reliability, performance, and cost.
Stay Hands-On and Raise the Engineering Bar - Write and review production code, solve complex technical problems, and champion excellent architecture, maintainable code, testing, observability, and production ownership.
Drive Performance & Reliability - Identify architectural and operational bottlenecks and lead meaningful improvements in scalability, resiliency, efficiency, observability, and production readiness.
Shape DevEx and AI-Driven Engineering - Improve how engineers build, test, debug, and operate software while leveraging AI, automation, and agentic approaches to accelerate development and unlock new capabilities.
Requirements: 6+ years of hands-on backend software engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex production systems.
Proven experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
Strong backend development skills in one or more modern languages such as TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Python, Java, or similar.
Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, preferably on GCP or AWS.
Hands-on experience with SQL and NoSQL databases and the ability to reason about data modeling, indexing, query performance, scalability, and operational trade-offs.
Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools as a meaningful part of the development workflow, combined with the engineering judgment to validate generated solutions and understand their trade-offs.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence technical decisions across teams and disciplines.
B.Sc. in Computer Science or an equivalent technical field, or equivalent practical / military experience.
Advantages
Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform, Pulumi, or similar technologies.
This position is open to all candidates.