Senior Software Engineer

Hardshell Inc.; Charlottesville (VA); Hybrid; USD 158,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health coverage

Job summary

Hardshell Inc. is seeking a senior software engineer to join a small team building production-grade backend systems for enterprise customers. You will own customer-facing applications and APIs, and you will integrate with AI platforms, vector stores, SharePoint/Drive, identity providers, and observability stacks.

Your work will include self-hosted and on-prem deployments. You will collaborate closely with founding engineers, set engineering practices, and own features end to end—from design

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production software for enterprise customers.
• Strong backend and API design and cross-stack work as needed.
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs and enterprise systems.
• Clear written communication and ability to work with customer engineers.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the customer-facing applications and APIs used to run exposure tests and manage data hardening.
• Build integrations into customer data systems: AI platforms, vector stores, SharePoint/Drive, identity providers, observability stacks.
• Turn research methods into production-grade software, including self-hosted/on-prem deployments.
• Own features end to end from design to release and production support with pilot customers.
• Contribute to engineering practices, including code review, testing, and release processes.

Skills

Backend/API design

Containerized deployments

Enterprise systems integration

Clear written communication

U.S. citizenship

Job description

The role

You’ll join a small engineering team that ships to paid pilot customers. Our AI security researchers develop the methods, and you'll turn them into software that security and data teams can deploy, trust, and run in their own environments. You'll work directly with our founding engineers and, when a pilot calls for it, with the customer.

What you'll do

• Build and own the customer-facing applications and APIs teams use to run exposure tests, review findings, and manage data hardening.
• Build integrations into the systems where customer data and AI already live: AI platforms, vector stores, document sources like SharePoint and Google Drive, identity providers, and observability stacks.
• Take methods from our AI security research team and make them production-grade, including in self-hosted and on-prem deployments.
• Own features end to end, from design through release and support in production with pilot customers.
• Help set the engineering practices we scale on, including code review, testing, and release.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years building production software, with meaningful time on systems used by enterprise customers.
• Strong backend and API design, and comfort working across the stack when the work calls for it.
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs and enterprise systems, including authentication, permissions, rate limits, and messy data.
• Experience with containerized deployments and cloud infrastructure.
• Clear written communication, and comfort working directly with a customer's engineers when a deployment needs it.
• U.S. citizenship.

Nice to have

• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, or LLM application frameworks.
• Background in identity, access control, or security products.
• Experience shipping software into customer-controlled or air-gapped environments.
• Early-stage startup experience.

The details

• Location: Hybrid in Charlottesville, VA, or remote on Eastern Time.
• Compensation: Up to $175K base salary, plus equity and health coverage.
• Eligibility: U.S. citizenship is required for this role because of our federal work.