Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform

About Nightfall

Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce.

Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others.

About the role

As a Senior Backend Software Engineer at Nightfall, you’ll enable us to deliver our platform reliably, securely, and at a massive scale. You’ll help architect low latency, real-time microservices that process & detect sensitive data at scale.

Responsibilities

• Building highly available and secure authentication and API services.
• Maintaining and evolving mission-critical internal databases and services.
• Architecting, optimizing and operating high volume with auto-scaling, reliable, real-time data ingestion infrastructure, ML inferencing, etc.
• Architecting search and agentic systems to perform highly concurrent workflows while optimizing LLM accuracy, cost and scalability.
• Building Observability at scale for detailed insights into customer usage and performance.
• Writing and maintaining documentation about internal and public services.

Requirements

• Expertise in one or more systems/high-level programming languages (e.g. Python, Go, Java, C++) and the eagerness to learn more.
• Grounded in Computer Science, Data Structures and Algorithms.
• Experience running scalable (thousands of RPS) and reliable (four 9’s) systems.
• Proven experience with building complex distributed systems scaling to substantial data volumes such as several TBs per day, or millions of users with production quality deployment, low latency microservices serving at high-throughput, monitoring, and reliability.
• Experience with building Search or Agentic AI systems at massive scale is a plus: ingestion, text summarization, semantic and classic search, prompt and context engineering, and agent orchestration.
• Experience with large-scale distributed storage and database systems (SQL or NoSQL, e.g. Postgres, Cassandra)
• Ability to decompose complex business problems and lead a team in solving them
• Data Processing - experience with building and maintaining large scale and/or real-time complex data processing pipelines using Postgres, Kafka, Flink, Snowflake, Hadoop or Zookeeper
• 6+ years of experience with proven technical leadership and prowess in scalable, distributed architectures

Tools We Use

• Go
• Node.js
• React
• Python
• Cassandra
• Redis
• SQL databases
• Terraform
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• AWS
• Kafka
• Envoy

Environment

Nightfall AI takes pride in being an equal-opportunity employer. We value a diverse and global talent pool and the collaboration that results from having a diverse and inclusive team. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our hiring decisions are based exclusively on merit, qualifications, and business needs.

Compensation

Employee compensation will be determined based on interview performance, level of experience, specialization of skills, and market rate. During the offer discussion, your recruiter will review the finalized base salary, bonus (for applicable roles), benefits & perks, and stock options as they’ll be reflected in the offer letter.