Principal Software Engineer – Athena

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Establish the technical vision for the Athena clearing house by making critical architectural decisions regarding data validation pipelines, customer entitlement systems, workflow orchestration, upstream reconciliation, OSV publication, and coalition interfaces. Expand both the team and the product area.

• Define and lead the transition from rapid prototyping to a robust, production-ready product stack that includes observability, incident management, and operational discipline.

• Collaborate with staff engineers to create domain ownership and establish technical standards throughout the team.

• Oversee the design of systems that handle unstructured vulnerability reports from enterprise clients, eliminate duplicate findings, and present clear signals to the libraries remediation team.

• Recognize and address technical debt that arose during the team's swift prototyping phase.

• Act as a strategic partner on build-vs-buy considerations, capacity planning, and long-term architectural decisions.

• Contribute to a hiring standard that attracts engineers capable of delivering significant output without experiencing burnout.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in setting technical direction for intricate, production-facing distributed systems, enhancing the overall capability of the team.

• Strong proficiency in Go, along with experience in GCP and Terraform is essential; we welcome polyglot engineers who can quickly adapt to new stacks.

• Ability to work with complex, unstructured data by validating, deduplicating, and extracting meaningful insights from real-world enterprise inputs.

• Experience in transitioning teams from fast-paced prototypes to sustainable systems, including monitoring, alerting, SLOs, and on-call responsibilities.

• Experience building systems that manage various customer types with distinct entitlements, access levels, and interaction patterns.

• Comfortable navigating the entire backend stack including workflows, data pipelines, and APIs with minimal supervision.

• Insights on cost-effective AI usage and resource distribution are advantageous.

• Previous experience in security-related areas (supply chain, vulnerability management, cloud security) is preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with opportunities for team meetups, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend to cover coworking spaces, phone, and internet expenses.

• Our Approach to Equity: Enjoy stock options upon hiring and promotion. Additionally, you can take part in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, that’s correct: 10 years!).

• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We pay 100% of your health, vision, and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents, ensuring nothing is deducted from your paycheck.

• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need; to produce our best work, we must recharge and reset.

• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We provide 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the flexibility to utilize it all at once or spread it throughout your child's first year.