Senior Python Software Engineer

Our MXDR service combines powerful proprietary AI with a one-of-a-kind collaboration model to continuously build a deep understanding of our customers’ environments, informing how we prevent, detect, and respond to threats. Our unrivaled Microsoft expertise allows customers to achieve these outcomes with the Microsoft Security tools they already own. 

The result is highly localized managed protection that empowers security teams to be faster, smarter, and more cost efficient than ever before. 

Continuous protection. AI-powered Nonstop SecOps. That’s Ontinue. 

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our engineering team in Zurich and help build the technology behind Ontinue’s AI-powered MXDR service.

This is a hands-on, backend-focused role where you’ll work mainly with Python and Azure, building distributed systems, services and automation that support our security operations.

We’re looking for someone who enjoys taking ownership of problems from start to finish. You’ll work closely with Product, Engineering and Security Operations to understand what’s needed, challenge ideas where appropriate, and turn sometimes loosely defined problems into reliable software that works in the real world.

Good judgement is just as important as technical depth. Sometimes a problem needs careful architectural thinking; sometimes the simplest solution is the right one. We want someone who is comfortable making those calls and explaining the thinking behind them.

We’re also embracing AI-assisted and agentic development. You’ll have the freedom to use these tools to work faster and smarter, but you’ll still be accountable for the quality, security and maintainability of what reaches production.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own your work from idea to production. Understand the problem, help shape the solution, build and test it, and stay involved once it’s running in production.
• Build backend systems in Python on Azure. Develop cloud-native services, APIs, event-driven systems and automation that support our security operations and wider platform.
• Work closely with Product and Security Operations. Understand how people use our technology, identify where we can make things better, and turn those needs into practical engineering solutions.
• Build for the real world. Design systems that can handle failures, retries, concurrency, asynchronous processing and dependencies on external services.
• Keep things as simple as they need to be. Balance reliability, security, performance and maintainability without introducing unnecessary complexity.
• Use AI coding tools thoughtfully. Use coding agents and assistants to accelerate development, while reviewing and challenging their output rather than accepting it at face value.
• Test the things that matter. Build meaningful tests and checks around expected behaviour, edge cases, failure scenarios and security boundaries.
• Run what you build. Help monitor services, investigate production issues and contribute to incident response and agreed on-call arrangements.
• Make the wider team better. Review code and designs, share knowledge, mentor colleagues and help improve our engineering practices, tooling and CI/CD.
• Collaborate with the team in Zurich. Spend regular time together for design discussions, problem-solving and knowledge sharing, while also working with colleagues internationally.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Strong experience building and running backend services in production.
• Excellent Python skills, including testing, typing, dependency management and asynchronous programming.
• A good understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architectures, APIs, data persistence and failure handling.
• Experience building cloud-native applications on Azure, or strong experience with another major cloud platform and an interest in learning Azure.
• Good product judgement. You want to understand why something should be built, not just how to build it.
• Experience using AI coding assistants or agents as part of real development work, combined with the technical ability to review, debug and challenge their output.
• An understanding of when AI-assisted development is useful and when something needs greater human scrutiny, particularly around security and sensitive information.
• Strong debugging skills across application code, services, data and infrastructure.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, observability and secure software development.
• The ability to explain technical decisions, risks and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Confidence working independently, dealing with ambiguity and taking ownership of your decisions.
• Willingness to work from our Zurich office two days per week.
• Fluency in English.

Nice to Have

You don’t need to tick every box, but experience in any of the following would be a bonus:

• Cybersecurity, SOAR, managed security services or SOC automation.
• Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Graph or Microsoft Entra ID.
• Durable workflow orchestration, message brokers or high-throughput event processing.
• Terraform, GitHub Actions, monorepos or trunk-based development.
• Building AI capabilities into production services and evaluating their reliability and safety.

What Success Looks Like

You’re someone who can take a problem that isn’t perfectly defined and turn it into software that is useful, reliable and maintainable.

You know when it’s worth prototyping quickly, when the straightforward solution is enough, and when a problem deserves deeper engineering. You’re comfortable using AI tools to move faster, but you don’t outsource your judgement to them.

Above all, success in this role isn’t about how much code you write. It’s about building dependable services, improving security outcomes and leaving the engineering team stronger than you found it.

What We Offer

We have been recognized as a top place to work! In addition to a competitive salary, we also offer great benefits and access to management and Microsoft training.

Come as you are!  We search for amazing people of diverse backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. Ontinue welcomes and encourages diversity in the workplace regardless of race, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation, disability, or veteran status.

Next Steps

If you have the skills and experience required and feel that Ontinue is a place you can belong, we would love to get to know you better! Please drop an application to this role and our talent acquisition manager will be in touch to discuss further.