Principal Engineer

At SAFE Security, our mission is bold and ambitious:
We Will Build CyberAGI
— a super-specialized system of intelligence that autonomously predicts, detects, and remediates threats. This isn't just a vision—it's the future we're building every day, with the best minds in AI, cybersecurity, and risk. At SAFE, we empower individuals and teams with the freedom and responsibility to align their goals, ensuring we all move towards this goal together.
We operate with radical transparency, autonomy, and accountability—there's no room for brilliant jerks. We embrace a culture-first approach, offering an unlimited vacation policy, a high-trust work environment, and a commitment to continuous learning. For us, Culture is Our Strategy—check out our
Culture Memo
to dive deeper into what makes SAFE unique.
As a Principal Engineer - Platform, you will drive the next wave of architectural direction and foundational platform capabilities that power Safe's multi-tenant architecture, AI integrations, and developer velocity. You will partner with engineering leadership, product, and cross-functional teams to define, build, and evolve the core systems that allow Safe to scale securely and reliably.

You'll not just execute, you'll lead and mentor, influence technical direction across the org, and champion best practices in systems design, scalability, reliability, and observability.

Core Responsibilities:

• Architect & Lead Platform Strategy: Drive the long-term vision for Safe's platform, including multi-tenant abstractions, schema and data isolation, shared services, event pipelines, API gateway, service mesh, secrets, and identity. Evaluate alternative architectures, lead design reviews, and ensure consistency across solutions
• Operational Excellence & Scalability: Ensure core services run at high performance, with high availability (SLA targets), fault tolerance, and horizontal/vertical scale. Conduct load testing, performance tuning, capacity planning, and cost optimization
• Cross-cutting "Horizontal" Ownership: Lead verticals like Authentication & Authorization, Developer Experience (DX tools, SDKs, APIs), Infrastructure as Code, observability (metrics, logs, tracing), and platform self-service
• Drive Engineering Standards & Best Practices: Oversee code quality, test coverage, and architectural hygiene. Mentor senior and staff engineers. Lead post-mortems, continuous improvement, and technical culture
• Collaboration & Influence: Work closely with Product, AI, Data, Security, and Infra leadership to align platform roadmap with business goals. Articulate tradeoffs, constraints, and design decisions
• End-to-End Ownership: From ideation to deployment and operations — you'll take ownership of critical paths, guide teams through complex features, and maintain reliability in production

Must-Have Qualifications:

• Experience: 12+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years as a senior/lead/principal engineer in platform, infrastructure, or backend systems
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven track record designing and building large-scale services, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, caching, concurrency, sharding, etc
• Strong Language Skills: Expert proficiency with Go, TypeScript, or Python (or equivalent); familiarity with multiple languages is a plus
• Storage & Messaging: Deep experience with RDBMS (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL/Key-value (Redis, DynamoDB, etc.), queue/event systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar)
• Cloud & Infra: Hands-on experience with AWS (or equivalent), containerization (Docker), orchestration (ECS, Kubernetes), IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Observability & Reliability: Expertise in logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and chaos engineering
• Security & Multi-Tenancy: Strong understanding of identity/authorization systems (RBAC, ABAC), secrets management, tenant isolation, compliance, and secure design principles
• Leadership & Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication. Comfortable influencing cross-functional stakeholders across geographies
• Problem-Solving & Judgement: Strong fundamentals of algorithms, data structures, design patterns, complexity, tradeoff analysis

Preferred / Nice-to-Have:

• Experience building B2B SaaS systems, integrations, and external APIs
• Exposure to AI/ML model serving, inference pipelines, vector databases, embedding stores, RAG, LLM integration
• Experience with data lakes, lakehouses, stream processing (e.g. Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, Debezium)
• Experience in "developer platform" or DX tooling (SDKs, CLI, internal APIs)
• Previous exposure to regulated or security-sensitive environments (compliance, audits, IS0 27001, SOC2)

If you're passionate about cyber risk, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and want to be part of a team that's redefining security—
we want to hear from you