Stairwell is building the future of threat detection and malware analysis. Our platform helps security teams find threats that others miss by transforming how organizations collect, analyze, and act on file-based intelligence. We're a small, high-impact team solving hard problems at the intersection of cybersecurity and large-scale data systems.
The RoleWe're looking for a back-end engineer who thrives in complex distributed systems and has embraced AI-assisted development as a core part of their workflow. You'll design and build the infrastructure that powers our threat detection platform - systems that process massive volumes of data with high reliability and performance.
We are rapidly embracing AI-driven development, and expect you to be fluent with tools like Claude Code, Copilot, or similar. You should have strong opinions about where AI accelerates your work and where it doesn't. We also highly value the human-in-the-loop - engineers at Stairwell know their customer, know the business, and know the architecture well, so that they can design and build effective products quickly.
What You'll DoDesign, build, and operate distributed systems in Go that handle large-scale data ingestion, processing, and analysis
Work across the stack on storage systems, message queues, APIs, and data pipelines
Collaborate with security researchers, subject-matter experts, and other engineers to turn threat detection concepts into scalable infrastructure
Improve system reliability, observability, and performance as we grow
Contribute to our engineering culture around AI-augmented development - sharing patterns, workflows, and lessons learned
Strong experience building production distributed systems (consensus, replication, fault tolerance, etc.)
Deep proficiency in Go; you write idiomatic, maintainable code
Practical experience with AI coding assistants as part of your regular development workflow - not just experimentation, but daily use
Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code: you know when to trust it, when to revise it, and when to write it yourself
Comfort with ambiguity and ownership; we're a small team where engineers drive decisions
Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), containerization, and infrastructure-as-code
Background in security, malware analysis, or threat detection
Experience with large-scale data systems, particularly Google BigTable, Spanner, etc.
Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects
Hard technical problems with real security impact
Small team, huge impact, high autonomy, low process overhead
Opportunity to collaborate with world-class experts in cybersecurity
Work remotely in the USA or Canada, or use our co-working space in Santa Clara to collaborate with teammates in-person
Skills Required
- Strong experience building production distributed systems (consensus, replication, fault tolerance)
- Deep proficiency in Go, writing idiomatic, maintainable code
- Practical, daily use of AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Copilot)
- Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code and decide when to trust or revise it
- Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in a small team environment
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred)
- Experience with containerization
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code
- Background in security, malware analysis, or threat detection
- Experience with large-scale data systems, particularly Google BigTable and Spanner
- Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects
What We Do
Stairwell helps organizations take back the cybersecurity high ground with solutions that attackers can't evade. Its flagship product, the Inception platform, empowers security teams to outsmart any attacker. Stairwell is comprised of security industry leaders and engineers from Google and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Gradient Ventures.
