Staff Software Engineer – AI, Agentic Security

Role Overview

• Design, build, review, and ship features powering Operant's products alongside the rest of the engineering team.
• Own significant systems or components end-to-end — architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, operation.
• Raise the technical bar through code review and contribute to architectural decisions on shared core systems.
• Provide live debugging and engineering depth for strategic APAC customers during their business hours.
• Participate in the engineering on-call rotation, with primary responsibility for customer-facing issues during APAC hours.
• Ship contained fixes and small features independently; coordinate with US engineering on anything architectural or cross-cutting.
• Make the call on what gets escalated to the US team overnight vs. waits for morning, and produce comprehensive async handoffs when escalating.
• Partner with the APAC Customer Success Team as their L2/L3 escalation path and technical partner.
• Join key deployment milestones, architecture reviews, and QBRs/EBRs when product depth is required.
• Translate field observations into product improvements; validate feasibility of regional feature requests and present synthesized feedback in the monthly product review.
• Operate with autonomy across a 12–14 hour gap from the US team, with disciplined async communication.
• Available during overlapping hours with Pacific Standard Time (PST) for global engineering meetings and synchronous work with US-based leadership.

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 3 years at senior, staff, or principal level shipping production systems at scale.
• Strong backend skills in one or more modern languages used in cloud infrastructure (Go, Rust, Python, or similar).
• Hands-on experience with on-call rotations and production incident response — debugging live customer-facing issues and shipping the underlying fixes.
• Deep hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and container security across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Strong working knowledge of runtime security, API security, CNAPP, or cloud workload protection.
• Hands-on experience with at least one of: MCP, agentic AI platforms, LLM orchestration, or AI agent security — or strong evidence you can pick it up quickly.
• Proven track record operating as a senior IC with significant autonomy — owning systems, making consequential technical decisions, and bringing others along through documentation and code review.
• Experience working across timezones with disciplined async habits — clear written communication, escalation criteria, comprehensive handoffs.
• Customer-facing technical experience — debugging live with customers and translating technical realities for senior security audiences.
• Conversant with AI tooling and and harnessing AI products in a way that preserves a strong and reliable software engineering discipline.
• Based in Bangalore, willing to travel across APAC for strategic customer engagements (10–20%).
• Available during overlapping hours with PST for regular synchronous work with the US team.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Azure
• Cloud
• Google Cloud Platform
• Kubernetes
• Python
• Rust
• Go

Benefits

• Competitive senior compensation — base salary, performance bonus, equity, and benefits benchmarked to Bangalore's senior technology market.
• Direct founder access — work closely with Operant's CTO and engineering leadership on the region's most strategic accounts and on the global product roadmap.
• Early in APAC — join a growing regional team with outsized influence on how Operant operates engineering across timezones as we scale.
• Lean team, outsized impact — tight, high-caliber team where your contributions are visible and your growth is real.
• Real engineering, not field engineering — you ship to the shared product codebase, not to a customer-specific fork.
• Health insurance.
• Wellness programs.