Principal Backend Software Engineer

Endor Labs; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading application security firm in Palo Alto seeks a Principal Member of Technical Staff to architect and evolve their core backend platform. You will drive technical strategy and mentor senior engineers within a hybrid work environment. Ideal candidates have 15+ years of experience in backend development, expertise in security products, and strong leadership skills. The compensation range for this position is expected to be between $220,000 - $300,000, alongside potential bonuses and stock options.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend focus.
• Experience building or architecting application security products.
• Strong product sense to build reliable SaaS products.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the core backend platform.
• Drive technical strategy and make high-impact design decisions.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives and mentor senior engineers.

Skills

Backend development

Security product expertise

Technical leadership

Communication skills

Tools

Go

Kubernetes

MongoDB

PostgreSQL

Job description

This role is based in Palo Alto, California, and follows a hybrid work model. If you’re excited about helping build a large-scale SaaS platform at an early-stage company and the qualifications below align with your background, we’d love to connect!

About Us

Endor Labs is building the Application Security platform for the software development revolution. Modern software is complex and dependency-rich, making it increasingly difficult to pinpoint the risks that truly matter. Endor Labs solves this challenge by building a call graph of your entire software estate—enabling teams to clearly identify, prioritize, and fix critical risks faster.

Trusted by companies that are one or one hundred years old, Endor Labs secures code whether it was written by humans or AI, and whether it's 40-year old C++ code or cutting edge Bazel Monorepos. Endor Labs was founded by serial entrepreneurs Varun Badhwar and Dimitri Stiliadis, and is backed by leading VC firms such as Dell Technology Capital, Lightspeed, and Sierra Ventures.

Sound interesting? Let’s talk if you want to be part of the next big leap in security innovation!

The Role

We are looking for a Principal Member of Technical Staff to join our engineering organization as a cross-cutting technical leader. This is a pure individual contributor role with significant architectural influence. You will work across teams to tackle our hardest backend scaling, reliability, and security product challenges.

As a Principal MTS, you will set technical direction, drive architecture evolution, and raise the bar for engineering quality across the organization. You will partner closely with engineering leadership, product, and other senior technologists to translate business and customer needs into scalable, high-performance systems.

This role is ideal for someone who has built and scaled security products before, thrives in a fast-paced startup environment, and has the rare combination of deep backend expertise and strong product instincts.

How You'll Make an Impact

• Architect and evolve the core backend platform, including microservices, async processing pipelines, and data infrastructure.
• Drive technical strategy and make high-impact design decisions that affect the entire product and engineering organization.
• Design and build high-performance, reliable SaaS services that process security data at scale with low latency and high throughput.
• Lead cross-team technical initiatives, collaborating with and through other senior engineers to ship complex features.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers through architecture reviews, design discussions, and hands‑on pairing.
• Partner with product leadership to shape the technical roadmap, balancing customer needs with long‑term platform health.
• Identify and resolve systemic performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and technical debt across the stack.
• Contribute directly to code in Go, working within our Kubernetes‑based infrastructure backed by MongoDB and Postgres.

What you Bring to the Table

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend focus. You have designed and built distributed systems, microservices architectures, and async workload processing at scale.
• Security product expertise. You have built or architected application security products before. Deep familiarity with AppSec, DevSecOps, or software supply chain security is strongly preferred.
• Strong product sense. You understand how to build SaaS products that are performant, reliable, and solve real customer problems. You think beyond the code to the user experience and business impact.
• Proficiency in Go with production experience in Kubernetes, MongoDB, and/or PostgreSQL. Familiarity with React on the frontend is a plus.
• Technical leadership at scale. You have set technical direction for engineering organizations, driven architecture decisions, and worked effectively with and through other senior technical leaders.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You can motivate engineers, build consensus on technical approaches, and clearly articulate complex trade‑offs to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Bonus Points

• Experience as a founding engineer or early-stage startup employee, where you built systems from zero to production.
• Track record of building and scaling developer‑facing products or platforms.
• Background in startup environments with the scrappiness and ownership mindset that comes with it.
• Contributions to open‑source security tooling or research.

We’re building at the intersection of developer productivity and security — one of the fastest‑growing spaces in software. Our dev‑loved platform has real ROI, strong momentum, and customers who care about doing things right.

At Endor Labs, we think big, start small, and learn fast. We take ownership, move with purpose, and always start with the customer’s success. We debate with data, make the complex simple, and challenge each other with kindness and candor. We celebrate wins, learn from misses, and have fun along the way — because when our customers win, we all win.

Endor Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Even if you don't fit every requirement above, we believe in the power of diverse perspectives and experiences, so we encourage all talented individuals to apply—there's no one‑size‑fits‑all here.

Compensation

For candidates who receive an offer for this position, the compensation range is expected to be between $220,000 - $300,000. This may include additional incentives such as commission targets, restricted stock units, and/or bonuses, depending on the role.