Founding Engineer

What You’ll Do

Join a team building at the cutting edge of AI and cybersecurity. Specular empowers organizations across private, public, and government sectors to proactively identify, assess, and remediate cybersecurity vulnerabilities to protect themselves from e-crime and nation-state cyber attacks. You'll have autonomy and direct influence over product direction and strategy. You'll focus predominantly on the backend and heavily contribute to building AI agents that automate traditional human-driven cybersecurity analyst workflows. A few high level focus areas for this role are below:

• Design and implement an AI-native platform to leverage LLMs to automate penetration testing and vulnerability management.
• Build workflows to utilize and refine AI models for proactive security tasks using modern LLM frameworks such as Agno, LangGraph/LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc.
• Design and implement scalable, serverless infrastructure using AWS services (e.g., Fargate, Lambda, ECS, DynamoDB).
• Develop RESTful APIs that allow customers too seamlessly interact with our data.
• Iterate closely with customer cybersecurity teams to build features that actually make a difference.
• While an emphasis will be placed on back-end development, you'll directly coordinate with frontend engineers to build a cohesive user experience.

Required Experience

Skills that we think are necessary to succeed in the role:

• 4+ years of software engineering experience‍
• Python: Proficient in Python for backend development.
• Cybersecurity: Familiar with cybersecurity fundamentals for onprem, hybrid, and cloud native networks with an emphasis on penetration testing and vulnerability management
• Cloud Experience: Deep understanding of AWS, with bonus points for familiarity with other cloud providers (e.g., Azure, GCP)‍
• IaC: Experience with Terraform or a desire to learn. Ability ‍to create modular reusable infrastructure components that are adaptable to different customer needs and security requirements.‍
• API Development: Strong experience designing and building robust, well-documented APIs. Proficient with modern Python frameworks such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI.
• Ability to design services that can be deployed across varying customer environments, including on-prem, hybrid, or cloud-native infrastructure.

Bonus Points Experience

Skills that are "nice to have" but not a requirement:

• Cybersecurity: Experience as a Red Teamer, Penetration Tester, Security Engineer, or Vulnerability Analyst‍
• AI / LLM:  Experience with LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering, or fine-tuning models.‍
• Big Data: Hands-on experience with large-scale data and processing and analytics platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake, or Splunk.
• ‍JavaScript: Proficient in JavaScript, with good experience in React.

Compensation

The base salary range for this position in the U.S. is $175,000 - $225,000 per year + equity + benefits.

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