Software Engineer 2 - Message Security Detection

Menlo Ventures; Canada; Remote; CAD 80,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

A cybersecurity startup is seeking a Software Engineer II to architect and build backend services for their Detection Engine. The role requires at least 3 years of experience in data-oriented products and a degree in Computer Science. You will leverage data analysis to improve detection efficacy while mentoring junior engineers. This position provides a unique opportunity to impact the team's direction in a rapidly evolving security landscape.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional experience as a hands-on engineer building data-oriented products.
• Proven experience with data analysis and using metrics to analyze system efficacy.
• Experience with high-throughput and low-latency distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deploy backend services that drive a Detection Engine.
• Perform deep inspection of false negatives and produce feature insights.
• Design feature extraction pipelines from raw email data.

Skills

Data analysis

Debugging complex systems

Collaboration with cross-functional teams

Performance optimization

Education

BS degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

Go

ML systems/products

Job description

About the Role

Abnormal Security is looking for a Software Engineer II to join the Message Detection - Attack Detection team. At Abnormal, we protect our customers against nefarious adversaries who are constantly evolving their techniques and tactics to outwit and undermine traditional security approaches. Abnormal has constantly been named as one of the top cybersecurity startups and our behavioral AI system has helped us win various cybersecurity accolades resulting in being trusted to protect more than 20% of the Fortune 500 (and ever growing).

In a landscape where a single successful attack can lead to financial losses of millions of dollars, the Attack Detection team plays the central role of building an extremely high recall Detection Engine that can operate on hundreds of millions of messages at millisecond latency. The team7s mission is to provide world-class detector efficacy to tackle a changing attack landscape using a combination of generalizable and auto-trained models as well as detectors for high value attack categories.

This team is solving a multi-layered detection problem, which involves modeling communication patterns to establish enterprise-wide baselines, incorporating these patterns as robust signals, and combining these signals with contextual information to create highly precise systems. The team builds discriminative signals at various levels including message level (e.g., presence of particular phrases), sender level (e.g., frequency of sender) and recipient level (e.g., likelihood of receiving a safe message). Additionally, to maintain a highly precise detection system, the team innovates on software systems and processes which can be quickly adapted to solve short-term trends and generalize well in the longer term.

This role would also have an opportunity to significantly impact the overall charter, direction and roadmap of the team. The Software Engineer II would be involved in understanding the domain of false negatives in the fraud detection domain, and build out the strategy for addressing the most pressing customer problems and execute the associated technical roadmap to continuously operate our detection decisioning system at an extremely high precision.

What you will do

• Architect, build and deploy backend services and infrastructure that drive a world-class Detection Engine
• Deep inspection and row-level data analysis of false negatives and false positives, and produce feature insights and heuristic detectors to iteratively improve detection efficacy
• Design and implement feature extraction pipelines that transform raw email data and behavioural patterns into meaningful, efficient structured signals
• Optimize backend features and services that directly power customer-facing detection capabilities, ensuring high performance and reliability
• Coach and mentor junior engineers via 1on1s, pair programming, high-quality code reviews and design reviews

Must Haves

• 3+ years of professional experience as a hands-on engineer building data-oriented products
• Proven experience with data analysis and using metrics to answer critical questions about system efficacy and drive development
• Experience with real-time, online, and/or high-throughput & low-latency distributed systems
• Strong ability to independently debug complex data and system issues using log analytics, metrics, and other signals
• Works well with other stakeholders - has worked with cross-functional teams to drive projects over the finish line
• BS degree in Computer Science, Applied Sciences, Information Systems, or another related engineering field

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of ML systems/products and/or distributed system technologies (feature platform serving systems, ML training and ML serving platforms, etc.)
• Experience working with high-throughput offline systems in Python and/or Go
• MS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or other related engineering field
• Familiarity with cyber security industry

Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please view here. If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please view here.