Staff Software Engineer - AI & Agentic Security - Bangalore (India)

Operant AI is a leading company in AI security, offering a comprehensive suite of products to protect AI deployments. They are looking for a senior backend engineer to contribute to their AI and Agentic security products, focusing on product engineering, system improvements, and customer support during APAC hours.

Responsibilities:

• 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 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
• Background in operating production cloud systems at scale — strong operational instincts, monitoring, alerting, and reliability practices
• Prior experience at an early or growth-stage startup (Series A–C) where you've built engineering practices, not just executed them
• Hands-on with agentic AI frameworks — LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, or similar
• Background in offensive security, penetration testing, or red teaming
• Prior experience with self-hosted enterprise deployments at major accounts