Senior Backend Engineer (Platform & Security) - Industrial AI and Automation

RLCore is building an adaptive optimization layer for industrial automation, utilizing reinforcement learning to enhance operational efficiency across various industries. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to develop robust backend services and security infrastructure for their platform, focusing on operational reliability and secure design principles.

Responsibilities:

• Work across our core backend services, including the I/O layer, deployment coordination, agent state management, and telemetry pipelines
• Take responsibility for backend platform components from design through production. Write architectural decision records (ADRs), implement, test, and maintain operational reliability
• Design and maintain APIs and service interfaces used across the platform, balancing flexibility with the operational constraints of edge deployment
• Build and own observability and monitoring for backend services, ensuring issues surface quickly in disconnected, offline environments
• Partner with the agent team on backend infrastructure for ML systems, focusing on data pipelines and state persistence
• Design systems with simplicity and ease of troubleshooting in mind to support offline edge deployments
• Participate in design and code reviews, maintaining high standards for the engineering team
• Build and maintain offline authentication, authorization, and secrets management infrastructure for edge environments, including JWT verification, permission claims, and credential storage, rotation, and auditing
• Establish and maintain secure software supply chain controls, including artifact signing, firmware integrity verification, and software bill of materials (SBOM) generation
• Act as the technical escalation point for complex security architecture inquiries during customer IT/OT reviews, providing technical inputs while product management and leadership own the compliance documentation
• Lead threat modeling and secure design reviews, and build automated security checks (boundary fuzzing, mock authentication failures, dependency vulnerability scans) into the deployment pipelines to catch risk before it reaches production
• Design secure, tamper-resistant audit trails and local persistence for sensitive data, including authentication events, privilege usage, configuration changes, and agent policy weights and state, preventing unauthorized local tampering or extraction

Requirements:

• Eight plus years of experience with a track record of designing, shipping, and maintaining complex backend services or platform infrastructure in production
• Solid grounding in distributed systems fundamentals — service boundaries, state management, and failure handling — in production environments
• Strong foundations in systems programming. We primarily write Python, but highly value experience in C++ or Rust. Advanced Python expertise is not required on day one if you have a strong systems background and are comfortable learning it on the job
• Practical experience or strong interest in systems-level security, including hardening local operating systems (Linux systemd, Windows Services) and virtualized environments, hardware root-of-trust (TPMs), secure boot, and encrypted local storage on edge machines
• Hands-on experience with PKI, TLS, cryptographic signing, and secrets management tools (e.g., OpenSSL)
• Comfort with ZeroMQ, Docker, and monitoring systems (e.g., Prometheus), alongside experience handling offline air-gapped deployments and remote update delivery
• Prior experience in OT/ICS security — securing SCADA, PLC, or other industrial control environments, or working within IT/OT convergence programs. This is a significant plus for this role
• Experience with digital twins and IIOT platforms