Staff Backend Engineer, AI Platform

About Nightfall

Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce.

Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others.

About the role

As a Backend Engineer at Nightfall, you’ll enable us to deliver our platform reliably, securely, and at a massive scale. You’ll help architect low latency, real-time microservices that process & detect sensitive data at scale.

Responsibilities

• Building highly available and secure authentication and API services.
• Maintaining and evolving mission-critical internal databases and services.
• Architecting, optimizing and operating high volume auto-scaling, reliable, real-time data infrastructure and services.
• Optimizing AI services to scale models for low latency, real-time ML inferencing, and agentic AI processing.
• Building Observability at scale for detailed insights into customer usage and performance.
• Writing and maintaining documentation about internal and public services.

Requirements

• Expertise in one or more systems/high-level programming languages (e.g. Go, Java, Python, C++) and the eagerness to learn more.
• Experience running scalable (thousands of RPS) and reliable (four 9’s) systems.
• Experience with developing complex distributed systems scaling to substantial data volumes or millions of users with production quality deployment, monitoring, and reliability.
• Experience with real-time ML inferencing or building Agentic AI systems at very high scale is a plus, including building eval pipelines.
• Experience with large-scale distributed storage and database systems (SQL or NoSQL, e.g. Postgres, Cassandra)
• Ability to decompose complex business problems and lead a team in solving them.
• Data Processing - experience with building and maintaining large scale and/or real-time complex data processing pipelines using Kafka, Flink, Snowflake, Databricks, etc.
• 8+ years of experience with proven technical leadership and prowess in scalable, distributed architectures

Environment

Nightfall AI takes pride in being an equal-opportunity employer. We value a diverse and global talent pool and the collaboration that results from having a diverse and inclusive team. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our hiring decisions are based exclusively on merit, qualifications, and business needs.

Compensation

Employee compensation will be determined based on interview performance, level of experience, specialization of skills, and market rate. During the offer discussion, your recruiter will review the finalized base salary, bonus (for applicable roles), benefits & perks, and stock options as they’ll be reflected in the offer letter.