Principal Engineer

Staff / Principal Software Engineer – US Remote

We are hiring for a pre-seed AI security startup building a governance and policy enforcement layer that sits between AI agents and their execution, giving enterprises the visibility and control they need to deploy agents safely at scale.

This is a founding-team-level engineering hire. You'll own the critical path: hardening the core governance engine, expanding integrations across major agent frameworks, and helping shape the engineering culture as we scale with leadership opportunities that come with it.

Working on:

• Hardening a real-time policy evaluation engine for enterprise scale — sub-100ms latency, 10k+ agent executions/day, and graceful degradation under load
• Building SDKs and integrations across major agent frameworks (LangGraph, Google ADK, Strands, and more) normalising agent execution events into a unified governance layer without requiring framework modifications
• Designing observability and telemetry so policy failures are caught and diagnosed before they reach users
• Consolidating integration infrastructure so new agent frameworks can be onboarded in weeks, not months
• Contributing to hiring, engineering standards, and technical direction as the company scales post-fundraise

What I'm looking for:

✔ 10+ years of hands-on engineering — still close to the code

✔ Strong Rust background (or C/C++/Go with the ability to ramp fast)

✔ Deep experience with distributed systems and backend services at scale

✔ Obsessive about observability, telemetry, and diagnosing systems in production

✔ Skilled in GCP ideally (AWS also considered)

✔ Security mindset — you build defensively and understand the cost of poor engineering hygiene

✔ Daily practitioner of AI coding tools inc agentic AI and discerning enough to keep quality high

Background fit:

The sweet spot is someone who has done both:

● Startup / scale-up / 0-1 experience — you know how to move fast, make pragmatic decisions, and build things that didn't exist before

● Enterprise or larger org experience — you've seen what good looks like at scale: rigorous testing, observability, reliable systems under real load

Ideally you'll have a background in cybersecurity, runtime security, agent governance, or policy enforcement — but strong engineers from high-scale infrastructure or data platform backgrounds are equally relevant.

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