AI Staff Engineer

PlexTrac is the #1 AI-powered penetration test reporting tool and platform for real time threat exposure management. It helps cybersecurity teams address the most critical threats and vulnerabilities efficiently. This innovative approach has allowed PlexTrac to gain significant traction among companies and teams of all sizes, including several of the Fortune 500.

Having recently closed a $70 million Series B funding round as of February 2022, PlexTrac is poised for exponential growth and is seeking top notch talent for strategic roles to join the team. Candidates interested in leveraging extensive professional experience to build innovative programs around a new concept in the cybersecurity market and who love working in a fast-paced, energetic start-up environment should apply!

PlexTrac Mission and Culture is to empower teams to win the right cybersecurity battles. PlexTrac is culturally a mission-oriented organization, by which we mean that we seek to make the lives of our customers better knowing that their improved efficiency and effectiveness has a direct impact on the security of our world. Likewise, we seek to improve the lives of our employees by creating a workplace in which they can flourish professionally and personally. We are flexible, creative, collaborative, detail oriented, humble, hard workers who practice what we preach. Those attributes in our team members lead to and are rewarded with a fast-paced, never boring, fun loving work environment — whether we are physically or virtually present with one another.

Our core values describe us as humans and leaning into them is how we define success:

• Integrity through transparency and accountability 
• Aggressive innovation
• Positively impact people

We are looking for an experienced, hands-on AI Staff Engineer (Product & Platform) to set technical direction, build core systems, and translate complex ML/AI tradeoffs into business outcomes everyone understands — from ICs to the CEO. As an AI Staff Engineer, you'll be at the forefront of our AI for CTEM (Cybersecurity Threat Exposure Management) initiative, playing a pivotal role in shaping its architecture, driving innovation, and guiding a skilled development team. 

If you're into building cutting edge solutions that have a real impact on organizations' cybersecurity and enjoy working in a collaborative, cross functional start up environment, apply today!

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end AI system architecture, including service design, infra, orchestration, runtime efficiency, and reliability. Model evaluation is part of the job, but the focus is on building and scaling production systems
• Build and ship production AI embedded products (prompt orchestration, fine-tuning pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation, model serving, observability)
• Be the principal engineer for AI: own the full SDLC for AI features: architecture, coding, deployment, testing, monitoring, and incident response
• Translate technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders (product, sales, execs) and create clear decision frameworks
• Mentor engineers, set engineering standards, and grow the AI engineering playbook (tests, data quality, safety guardrails)
• Drive vendor & model strategy (open-source vs hosted LLMs)
• Strong communicator who can represent engineering constraints and architectural decisions clearly to cross-functional leaders

Qualifications

• 7+ years software engineering experience, primarily backend, distributed systems, infra, or platform engineering
• Proven history shipping production AI features and systems (service integration, model hosting, infra, performance optimization). Fine-tuning experience is a plus, not the core requirement
• Deep technical understanding of inference stack, scaling, latency/cost tradeoffs, and data pipelines
• Experience evaluating and integrating foundation models; ability to operationalize them safely with monitoring/observability
• Hands-on experience operationalizing LLM/RAG systems (performance tuning, reliability engineering). Fine-tuning experience optional
• Strong experience with Python and knowledge of JavaScript development,
  strong backend engineering experience preferred
  (TypeScript, React)
• Experience building robust data ingestion and transformation services used by downstream AI systems
• Strong systems and API design skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a startup (Series A/B) or built a product line around Gen-AI
• Familiarity with SRE best practices for model serving, prompt testing, and ML observability tools including, incident response, on-call rotation participation, and debugging distributed systems
• Experience negotiating with model/Vendor partners and cost optimization at scale

Benefits

• Competitive wellness benefits including Medical, Dental, Vision, Disability and Life
• 401(k)
• Paid Parental Leave
• Flexible work schedule - WFH, WFO
• Flexible Time Off
• World Class Culture

The typical pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD  [$170,000.00] to [$280,000.00] per year. PlexTrac utilizes different base pay ranges for different work localities, which allows us to pay employees competitively and consistently based on their home market. The range above reflects the potential base pay across the U.S. for this role; the specific applicable base pay range will depend on the candidate’s work location. In addition to a candidate’s work location, an individual’s base pay will also depend on a number of factors, such as complexity and responsibility of the posted role, job duties/requirements, and relevant experience and skills. Base pay ranges are reviewed and typically updated each year. Offers are made within the base pay range applicable at the time.

Kindly note that PlexTrac may decline applications from individuals located outside the United States. Remote work opportunities are reserved for employees permanently situated within the United States. Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

At PlexTrac, certain roles are eligible for additional rewards, including merit increases, annual bonus and equity options. These awards are allocated based on individual performance. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role. Benefits listed here vary depending on the nature of employment the Company and the employee’s work location. Employees also have access to healthcare benefits, a 401(k) plan, employee-paid short-term and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, uncapped time-off, and several paid holidays.

PlexTrac provides equal employment opportunities to all applicants for employment without regard to actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth and pregnancy-related conditions), gender identity or expression (including transgender status), sexual orientation, marital status, military service and veteran status, physical or mental disability, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws and ordinances. If you require assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruitment process, please send a request via email to [email protected].

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