Software Engineer

Petual; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 195,000; Full time

Job summary

Petual, an AI-powered control testing platform, seeks engineers to own the agent harness and backend services that test controls across complex environments. You will design APIs, data models, and integrations with cloud infra, identity providers, ticketing systems, and ERPs, ensuring secure, auditable results for auditors.

Ideal candidates have experience with LLM-based workflows, enterprise SaaS, and end-to-end feature delivery, with a track record of ownership in early- or growth-stage

Qualifications

• Experience building on LLMs and agentic systems (harnesses, long-horizon agents, evals, or resilient workflows).
• Experience building enterprise SaaS products that handle sensitive customer data.
• Comfort across the stack: backend fundamentals (APIs, data modeling, distributed systems) plus frontend fluency.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code (Terraform or similar).
• Experience in fintech, audit, governance, risk, compliance, or another regulated environment.
• Track record of high ownership at an early- or growth-stage startup, shaping code, product, and process.

Responsibilities

• Own the agent harness at the core of the product: workflows, checkpoints, and evaluation for long-horizon testing.
• Design and own backend services and APIs that carry evidence from ingestion to auditor-ready output.
• Build integrations with customer systems (cloud infra, identity providers, ticketing, ERPs).
• Design data models and system architecture to scale with customers and volume.
• Write secure, resilient code with data integrity in mind given sensitive evidence.
• Partner with customers to craft and ship features that matter to testers.

Skills

LLM systems

Backend APIs

Data modeling

Distributed systems

Security & data integrity

Frontend fluency

SaaS product development

Ownership & startup mindset

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Petual is the AI-powered control tester for the modern enterprise. Our agents test whether a company's financial, operational, and technology controls actually work, and trace every conclusion to its source.

The hard part isn't speed. It's being right. External auditors re-perform our work, so precision on sample 1 has to equal precision on sample 400, and an agent that can't support a conclusion has to say so rather than guess. We're backed by Andreessen Horowitz; the team comes from Stripe, Retool, and Lyft; and public companies already run their SOX programs on Petual.

The Opportunity

The interesting problem is not getting an agent to test a control once. It is knowing whether it was right across hundreds of controls, for customers whose methodologies all differ, where the ground truth is a senior auditor's judgment rather than a label in a dataset. Building the harness and the evaluation that make that tractable is the core of this role, and it would be yours to own.

What You'll Do

• Own the agent harness at the core of the product: the workflows, checkpoints, and evaluation that keep long-horizon agents reliable across hours of testing

• Design and own the backend services and APIs that carry evidence from ingestion, through analysis, to auditor-ready output

• Build integrations with the systems our customers keep evidence in: cloud infrastructure, identity providers, ticketing systems, ERPs, and more

• Design the data models and system architecture that have to hold up as our customer base and control volume grow

• Write code and design systems with security and data integrity in mind, given the sensitivity of the evidence our customers share with us

• Partner directly with our customers to craft and ship the features that matter most to the people actually doing the testing

What We're Looking For

• Experience building on LLMs and agentic systems: harnesses, long-horizon agents, evals, or resilient workflows that survive contact with messy real-world input

• Experience building enterprise SaaS products that handle sensitive customer data

• Comfort working across the stack: solid backend fundamentals (APIs, data modeling, distributed systems) plus enough frontend fluency to ship a feature end to end

• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code

• Experience in fintech, audit, governance, risk, compliance, or another regulated environment

• A track record of high ownership at an early- or growth-stage startup, where you shaped not just the code but the product and the process around it