Full-Stack Product Engineer (Backend Focus)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Work arrangement: Hybrid, 3 days/week in office (Tuesday-Thursday)
Employment: Full-time
Visa: Open to visa transfers, including OPT, H-1B transfers, TN, and most other visa types; no new H-1B sponsorship
About the company
This fast-scaling, venture-backed cybersecurity startup builds human risk management solutions for the enterprise. The platform helps organizations identify risky employee behaviors and automatically deliver targeted interventions, bringing together signals from customer integrations to build risk profiles, understand behavioral patterns, and reduce human-driven security risk in real time. The team is early-stage, product-driven, and working with a growing base of enterprise customers in a large cybersecurity market.
The Role
We are looking for a Full-Stack Product Engineer with a backend focus to join our engineering team in San Francisco.
You will build the customer-facing product experiences at the heart of the platform. The role is approximately 70% backend and 30% frontend, but you will own features end-to-end and move across the stack as needed.
You will work with Python, Django, PostgreSQL, React, and GraphQL, designing the systems and experiences that turn complex behavioral data into useful products for enterprise customers.
This is a product engineering role, not a platform, infrastructure, or design-systems position. You will be expected to think beyond implementation: understand the customer problem, determine what should be built, and measure whether the resulting product actually works.
With only one product manager across the company, engineers have significant product ownership and direct exposure to customers.
What You will Do
Design and build backend systems and data models that power the product.
Own customer-facing features from concept through production.
Build APIs and evolve the GraphQL schema while maintaining backwards compatibility.
Design and optimize PostgreSQL schemas, queries, and data access patterns.
Build frontend experiences using React or Next.js when needed.
Work closely with product and design to turn customer problems into intuitive product experiences.
Engage with early customers, incorporate feedback, and iterate quickly.
Make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, and maintainability.
Participate in code reviews and establish engineering standards.
Mentor teammates and contribute to a strong engineering culture.
Help determine what should be built, not simply how it should be implemented.
Particularly Relevant Backgrounds
We value engineers who have worked at strong product-driven technology companies or early-stage startups with meaningful traction. Relevant backgrounds may include companies such as Abnormal AI, Ramp, Retool, Robinhood, Airtable, Brex, Notion, Rippling, Anduril, Instacart, Circle, DoorDash, Block / Square, Samsara, ByteDance, and Whatnot.
We are also interested in engineers from Seed through Series B startups backed by leading venture firms, particularly those who have had significant ownership over customer-facing products.
What Makes Someone Successful Here
The strongest engineers combine technical depth with product judgment. You should be comfortable asking whether something should be built just as much as how it should be built. You will work directly with customers and teammates to understand problems, make decisions with incomplete information, ship quickly, and iterate based on real-world feedback.
We are particularly interested in people who can clearly explain the customer problem they were solving, why they chose a particular approach, what they personally owned, the technical and product tradeoffs they made, what happened after launch, and how they measured success.
What This Role Is Not
This is not primarily a platform engineering role, an infrastructure engineering role, a design systems role, a developer tooling role, or a frontend-only role. The role is centered on shipping customer-facing product, with a strong backend component.
Tech Stack
Backend: Python, Django
Database: PostgreSQL
API: GraphQL
Frontend: React / Next.js
Architecture: Customer-facing, data-intensive product systems
Interview Process
1. Intro Call (30 minutes): background and experience, full-stack and backend experience, relevant projects and scope of ownership, company stage and the role, motivation and interest, compensation expectations and timeline.
2. Hiring Manager Screen (45 minutes): a significant project built end-to-end, product and technical decisions, tradeoffs and execution, customer and business outcomes, ownership and independence, collaboration and engineering culture.
3. Technical Phone Interview (1 hour): React fundamentals, state management, API integration, frontend architecture, backend/API design, data modeling, and live coding or system-design discussion. The frontend portion is practical; you should be comfortable building a small React application from scratch and knowing when to use tools such as useState, useEffect, and useRef.
4. Onsite Interview (3-4 hours): coding interviews focused on problem-solving, code quality, and algorithmic thinking; a structured career walkthrough covering achievements, transitions, and growth; conversations with leadership about mission, culture, and the role.
5. Offer: successful candidates will receive an offer including competitive salary and equity.
If you are a product-minded engineer who enjoys owning problems end-to-end, working directly with customers, and building foundational product systems at an early-stage cybersecurity company, we would love to hear from you.
- 3+ years of full-time software engineering experience, with roughly 3-6 years being the target range.
- A Computer Science degree or equivalent technical background.
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals.
- Professional experience with Python and Django.
- Strong experience with PostgreSQL, including schema design and query performance.
- Experience designing and building APIs.
- Experience building frontend interfaces with React or Next.js.
- A demonstrated history of owning products or features end-to-end.
- Evidence of shipping software that had measurable or tangible customer impact.
- Strong product intuition and an ability to understand customer problems, not just technical requirements.
- Experience working effectively in a fast-moving engineering environment.
- Competitive equity
- Hybrid work in San Francisco (3 days/week in office, Tuesday-Thursday)
- Open to visa transfers (OPT, H-1B transfers, TN, and most other visa types; no new H-1B sponsorship)