Distinguished Software Engineer

About Sondera

AI agents act on what people write, not on everything they mean. Each step can be allowed while the sequence does harm. Sondera's policy engine decides each action from everything the agent has done in the session, using natural-language rules we turn into formal policy. The same action, in the same state, under the same policy, gets the same decision, whichever vendor built the agent. The open problem underneath is semantic integrity: every action carries out what an authorized person meant. We've published our work on it at an ICML workshop and presented it at Black Hat Arsenal, BSides and [un]prompted. Our open-source hooks and policy engine already govern coding agents, and enterprise customers run our platform. Our team has built products at Cylance, Databricks, HiddenLayer, NetRise and Obsidian Security, and we're backed by Decibel, Runtime Ventures and Aviso Ventures.

About the role

You own the architecture of Sondera's backend services: the Rust services that render a verdict before each agent action, store every trajectory, and serve the console and agents. Security engineers and CISOs answer auditors with those verdicts. If a service is slow, developers route around it; if it fails open, the control is gone. You decide how our services are designed, how they talk to each other, scale and fail, and what good Rust looks like here. You set the technical bar and run design review. You'll turn our AI security research into enforceable, systems-level guarantees.

Distinguished is our most senior individual-contributor role; you lead through design and review, not reports.

In your first year you will

• Write the architecture of record for our backend services, with a decision record.
• Show that verdicts replay exactly from recorded trajectories, and that enforcement fails closed under failure injection.
• Take research into production as services with their own latency and cost budgets.
• Set the Rust bar the team holds: how services are structured, handle errors and concurrency, and justify unsafe code.
• Prove the services hold at the scale our largest customers need.
• Raise the bar on every principal hire, and present our architecture at a security or systems venue.

You may be a good fit if you

• Have designed and run backend services in production that others now extend.
• Have written production Rust for years, and know async, concurrency, performance and unsafe code deeply.
• Turn correctness into checks: invariants, property tests, replay, and formal methods where they pay.
• Write the decision down and bring dissenting engineers along.
• Use coding agents daily, and review what they write as closely as a colleague's work.

Strong candidates may also have

• Contributions to the Rust ecosystem: crates, async runtimes or the compiler.
• gRPC services, Postgres at scale, or high-volume event pipelines.
• Authorization or policy engines.
• A public record of your work: peer-reviewed papers, talks, CVEs, open source or technical writing.

Our stack

Rust for every backend service, including the ones that render verdicts, Python for AI, and TypeScript for the web applications. Agent events are stored in Postgres. Policy compiles to a formal policy language. The platform runs in Google Cloud and in customers' own infrastructure.

How we work

The people who write our papers ship the product, so what breaks in production sets our next question. We study four open problems: turning written rules into policy, enforcing that policy at runtime, making agent behavior inspectable, and overseeing fleets of agents without a person reviewing every action. We build Sondera with coding agents it governs, and a person who owns the code approves every change they make to production. Whoever builds something runs it. We work remotely and in writing, and we flag decisions we can't undo before we make them.

Logistics

• Location: Remote, United States. We meet in person three times a year.
• Compensation: Base salary of $240,000–$280,000 USD, plus equity.
• Benefits: Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents; a 401(k) plan; unlimited paid time off, and we expect you to take about a week each quarter, plus paid holidays.
• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas, including transfers, though not for every role or candidate.
• Interview process: screen → work-sample interview and review → architecture and research interview → career deep dive (a structured walk through your past roles) → references. We aim to make a decision within two weeks of your screen.
• Using AI in your application and interviews: Use AI to prepare, and to polish an application you wrote yourself. In the work sample you'll build without AI, then extend your work with a coding agent, so we see both how you design on your own and how you check an agent's output. The other interviews are without AI.

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification.