Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform

Kaicyberinc; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity options

Supportive work environment

Job summary

Kai is building an AI-powered cybersecurity platform to help enterprises manage vulnerabilities at machine speed. We seek an experienced software engineer to scale our Python/FastAPI services and orchestrate reliable, secure deployments across distributed systems.

You'll own test infrastructure, CI/CD improvements, and collaboration with AI scientists, while mentoring growing engineers and contributing to a high-performance engineering culture.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering with backend focus.
• MS in Computer Science, AI, ML, or related field; PhD preferred.
• Deep Python production-grade coding with async/await, dataclasses vs Pydantic.
• Testing as a core discipline; experience with pytest, mocks, and fixtures.
• Experience designing REST APIs and cloud-based services; CI/CD in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Build the test suite from ground up with unit/integration tests and CI integration.
• Harden production services with security reviews, logging, health checks, metrics, and traces.
• Improve the CI/CD pipeline with automated quality gates and lint checks.
• Refactor for maintainability by extracting reusable modules and reducing duplication.
• Manage dependencies with lock files and resolve version inconsistencies; ensure reliability and performance of AI services.
• Design caching strategies, rate limiting, and circuit breakers for external APIs.
• Collaborate with AI scientists on prompts and outputs; mentor mid-level engineers.

Skills

Backend development

Python

Testing

CI/CD

Education

MS in Computer Science or related field

PhD preferred

Tools

FastAPI

Django REST Framework

Kubernetes

Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions / GitLab CI

Docker

Job description

Kai is the AI company rebuilding cybersecurity for the machine-speed era. Founded by second time founders and trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises, Kai is building a future where security has no categories, no silos, and no human speed bottlenecks. The Kai Agentic AI Platform replaces fragmented, human-limited workflows with agentic AI systems that continuously contextualize, assess, reason, and execute security work at machine speed - making human defenders, superhuman.

Why Join Kai

• Well-funded: With $125M raised, we have the capital, runway, and resolve to rebuild cybersecurity from first principles.
• Proven: We've earned the trust of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, and we're just getting started. Their confidence in Kai reflects what we've built: an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that performs at the scale and speed the enterprise demands.
• Experienced founders: Our founding team consists of second-time entrepreneurs, each with over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry.
• World-class leadership team: Our Heads of AI, Engineering, and Product bring extensive experience from some of the world’s most influential companies, ensuring top-tier mentorship, direction, and vision.
• Frontier AI Applied Research Team: Our researchers operate at the leading edge of agentic AI systems, translating breakthrough capabilities into real-world cybersecurity applications.
• Generous compensation: We offer highly competitive salaries, equity options, and a supportive work environment. Your contributions will be valued and rewarded as we grow together.

About the Role

We are building an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that helps enterprises manage vulnerabilities at scale. Our AI team has built working services that analyze container images, standardize package data, extract natural language filters, and assess package maintenance - all powered by LLMs and intelligent automation. Now we need an experienced software engineer to make these systems scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the test suite from the ground up. You'll design the test infrastructure - unit tests with mocked LLM responses, integration tests against staging environments, and fixtures that make testing fast and reliable. You'll wire this into CI so nothing ships without passing tests.
• Harden production services. Audit and fix security issues. Implement structured logging. Add health checks, metrics, and traces.
• Improve the CI/CD pipeline. You'll add quality gates so the team catches issues before they reach production.
• Refactor for maintainability. Extract shared patterns into reusable modules. Break apart oversized classes and reduce code duplication across services.
• Fix dependency management. Introduce lock files for reproducible builds, remove unused dependencies, and resolve version inconsistencies across services.
• Own the reliability and performance of our AI service fleet (Python/FastAPI microservices) Build out observability - distributed tracing, latency dashboards, alerting on error rates and SLA breaches.
• Design and implement caching strategies, rate limiting, and circuit breakers for external API calls (Anthropic, Azure ML, package registries).
• Collaborate with AI scientists on prompt engineering and output parsing, bringing engineering rigor to LLM integration patterns.
• Mentor mid-level engineers as the team grows

Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong backend focus
• M.S. in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related field. PhD preferred.
• Deep Python expertise - not scripting, but well-structured production code. You understand when to use dataclasses vs Pydantic, how async/await actually works, and why global variables make testing painful
• Testing as a core discipline. You've built test suites for services with external dependencies. You're comfortable with pytest, mocking, fixtures, and know how to test code that calls third-party APIs without calling them
• FastAPI or equivalent modern Python web framework experience (Django REST Framework, Flask with production patterns). You've designed and maintained REST APIs that other teams depend on Azure or equivalent cloud platform experience. You've worked with managed container services, Kubernetes, managed databases, identity/auth systems, and CI/CD in a cloud environment.
• Azure preferred; AWS/GCP experience transfers well
• CI/CD pipeline engineering. You've added test gates, lint checks, and automated quality enforcement to build pipelines.
• Experience with Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI Docker and containerization. You've written production Dockerfiles, understand multi-stage builds, and have debugged container networking and configuration issues
• Strong code review and collaboration skills. You'll be working with AI scientists who are strong in their domain but still developing engineering practices. You need to raise the bar without creating friction

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with LLM provider APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI) - understanding token limits, prompt design, structured output parsing, and retry patterns
• Experience with structured logging (structlog), observability tools (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), or APM platforms
• Exposure to cybersecurity, vulnerability management, or compliance-sensitive environments
• Experience on a small engineering team at a startup, where you owned