Staff Software Engineer, Platform
SandboxAQ
About SandboxAQ
SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors.
We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders.
At SandboxAQ, we’ve cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we’re building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact.
About The Role
The Cybersecurity Group at SandboxAQ is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help functionalize AQtive Guard, our groundbreaking solution for modern non-human identity and cryptography management, already launching globally with major organizations like top-tier financial institutions and government agencies.
We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to design, build, and maintain mission-critical services in both Kotlin and Go, deployed on Kubernetes and leveraging Kafka to ensure high-throughput, low-latency asynchronous processing of security data. The ideal candidate is passionate about building fault-tolerant and highly available systems, and will be instrumental in pushing the boundaries of performance and reliability to provide our customers with groundbreaking cybersecurity analysis.
How We Succeed Together
We move fast, build with purpose, and are obsessed with making an impact. Our culture is built for those who want to be at the forefront of innovation, and it's guided by these core principles:
- We are passionate about solving real-world problems for our customers.
- We take deep ownership of our work and hold ourselves to the highest standards of excellence.
- We are a team that stands by our commitments to each other and our customers, building trust through reliability.
- We are proactive and action-oriented, always seeking opportunities to make a difference and drive our mission forward.
- We believe in amplifying our collective impact through collaboration.
- We are dedicated to seeing our projects through to the finish line, ensuring that every detail is accounted for and that our work has a lasting impact.
What You'll Do
- Take ownership of projects in a fast-paced startup environment, demonstrating a tolerance for ambiguity and a proactive approach to getting things done
- Design, build, and maintain mission-critical services in both Kotlin and Go on Kubernetes
- Leverage Kafka and KStreams in asynchronous processing of security data
- Champion and implement best practices for building highly available, fault-tolerant, and observable distributed systems suitable for top-tier financial and government clients
- Drive performance tuning and optimization efforts, pushing the boundaries of our systems to meet stringent latency and reliability requirements
- Mentor other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and pair programming to elevate the team's technical excellence
- Collaborate closely with product managers and security researchers to translate requirements for our AQtive Guard solution into robust and scalable technical designs
Who You Are
- You have experience with our core tech stack; Kotlin, Go, Kafka, Postgres, Kubernetes
- You have a proven ability to thrive on a small team in a fast-paced, fluid environment, effectively managing uncertainty
- You have a solid understanding of standard IT security best practices
Qualifications
- 5+ years of production experience with at least one of our core languages (Kotlin, Go), and a willingness to learn the other quickly
- Production experience with Kafka, bonus points for KStreams
- Practical, "production scale" experience with RDBMS (e.g., Postgres)
- Production experience using Kubernetes
Nice-to-Haves
- Knowledge of security-related concepts and technologies
- Familiarity with Bazel
- Proficiency in other languages, in order of preference: Rust, Python
- General knowledge of cryptography
The US base salary range for this full-time position is expected to be $183k to $256k per year. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. This role may be eligible for annual discretionary bonuses and equity.