Principal Backend Engineer

Oleria is an enterprise cybersecurity startup recently founded by notable industry senior leaders Jim Alkove and Jagadeesh Kunda, with deep security and SaaS experience building and securing some of the world's largest platforms and products, used by billions of people worldwide everyday. We have closed funding, giving us two-plus years of runway, and are based in Seattle. We are seeking a very experienced backend engineer/architect to be a critical part of our early stage engineering team.

We recognize that identity-based attacks to software as a service (SaaS) applications are becoming more and more common highlighting the importance of addressing access risks to prevent data breaches. Traditional access management methods are human-intensive and often have significant blind spots, making it challenging to manage access risks effectively. At Oleria, our mission is to transform the state of access control tooling for enterprise SaaS applications, to drastically reduce the opportunity and scope of data breaches. Our customers are mostly names you hear every day - Fortune 500 corporations and public sector organizations.

As an early hire, you will have an opportunity to build as well as help architect our systems and platforms, including our development practices and processes. Many fundamental choices have not yet been made, so this greenfield background is an unusual opportunity to have broad ownership and ability to define requirements and goals for across product delivery, tools, and process..

Though you likely have significant experience as a technical and perhaps people and team leader, you are totally comfortable with hands on a keyboard, and you're excited by the opportunity to write code and deliver a working product in a constrained time frame, while building the systems and practices to allow us to continue to scale and grow the engineering team.

Above all, you have a bias for action. You love getting product out the door and learning from tight feedback loops, and love the satisfaction you'll receive from knowing that your contributions are directly improving the security of data for millions of people in the world.

Responsibilities

• Design, prioritize, and build infrastructure and services to support end to end experiences. Deployment target is currently AWS, though we may expand to additional public clouds in the future.
• Data is our life - much of our stack is related to data import, transport, cleaning, storage, analysis, and learning. This is not however typical ETL - our bread and butter is sophisticated security analysis on user behavior, and are data sets are petabyte vs terabyte scale, so multi-layer distributed systems able to drive real-time analysis and alerting are the norm.
• Work with our team to create, design and implement a world-class development lifecycle, architecture, and toolset, from initial concept through DevSecOps delivery
• Define service architecture and APIs to implement the above
• Understand and participate in tradeoff discussions, but have the courage to stand behind principles and values that you believe cannot be compromised on.

Qualifications

• BS, Masters, or PhD in computer science or related, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years backend development
• Strong understanding of industry best practices across entire lifecycle from idea to design to development, as well as test, deployment, operations, monitoring, and incident management
• Languages and Frameworks: Many and varied, with understanding of technical and community pros, cons, and tradeoffs. Likely includes Python, Java, React, Typescript.
• Have shipped and operated high-scale commercial SaaS products, with all that entails
• Understanding of core networking, data transport and persistence systems and methods at scale, particularly noSQL
• Broad direct experience with at least one public cloud platform - AWS preferred, Azure, GCP, and modern deployment tooling (CI/CD, containers, Terraform, etc.)
• Deep understanding of performance, privacy, scalability, HA/DR, instrumentation, logging & alerting, and other requirements of industry best practice enterprise scale products and services
• Understanding of industry best practice security and privacy and data governance requirements and practices
• Familiar with secure development practices, from coding to artifact generation to deployment
• Ability to work and thrive in a fast-moving world with ambiguity and potential change as daily companions

Bonus qualifications

• Experience or strong interest in ML/AI and what it takes to deliver in end products
• Building and operating large-scale distributed systems, with live HA/DR
• Familiar with multiple identity and access management systems
• Fully automated CI/CD pipelines, with IaC (Infrastructure as Code) methodologies - Terraform/Helm, Pulumi, etc.
• Experience building, deploying, and/or operating highly secure deployments, e.g. SOC 2, FedRAMP compliance

This position is based in Seattle, WA / Remote from anywhere in the United States with at least 3-4 days per month traveling to work onsite for those living outside of the Greater Seattle Area is possible for the right candidate.