Senior Backend Cloud Engineer
kaiSan Jose (CA)
Senior Backend Cloud Engineer
Posted 2 days ago
kaiSan Jose (CA)
SENIORITY
Lead
About the role
Kai is the AI company rebuilding cybersecurity for the machine-speed era. Founded by second time founders and trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises, Kai is building a future where security has no categories, no silos, and no human-speed bottlenecks. The Kai Agentic AI Platform replaces fragmented, human-limited workflows with agentic AI systems that continuously contextualize, assess, reason, and execute security work at machine speed - making human defenders superhuman. Why Join KaiWell-funded: With $125M raised, we have the capital, runway, and resolve to rebuild cybersecurity from first principles. Proven: We've earned the trust of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, and we're just getting started. Their confidence in Kai reflects what we've built: an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that performs at the scale and speed the enterprise demands. Experienced founders: Our founding team consists of second-time entrepreneurs, each with over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry. Their proven expertise and vision drive our ambitious goals. World-class leadership team: Our Heads of AI, Engineering, and Product bring extensive experience from some of the world's most influential companies, ensuring top-tier mentorship, direction, and vision. Frontier AI Applied Research Team: Our researchers operate at the leading edge of agentic AI systems, translating breakthrough capabilities into real-world cybersecurity applications. Generous compensation: We offer highly competitive salaries, equity options, and a supportive work environment. Your contributions will be valued and rewarded as we grow together.
Responsibilities:
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams, building cloud backends and data pipelines
- Design, build, and own microservices and distributed backend systems from architecture through deployment and production operations
- Lead technical delivery from architecture and design to implementation, testing, deployment, and operations
- Work with product and design teams to deliver performant and reliable backend services and APIsChampion software development best practices, including CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability, and test automation
- Ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability of backend and cloud systems at production scale
- Mentor engineers and foster a culture of ownership, learning, and continuous improvement within the engineering team
Must Haves:
- 7+ years of experience as a cloud or backend engineer
- Experience designing and building microservices in a production cloud environment
- Strong understanding of distributed systems — fault tolerance, consistency, and scalability at production scale
- Strong experience designing APIs and building asynchronous systems with robust error handling
- Hands‐on experience with AWS, including serverless and cloud‐native architectures
- Experience with Azure services and Infrastructure as Code tools, such as API Management, Azure Functions, Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Azure Active Directory, or Bicep/Terraform
- Familiarity with data pipelines and cloud-native data streaming tools such as Kinesis
- Strong Python experience for backend services, automation, and tooling
- Golang development experience for backend services
- Experience with AWS services and Infrastructure-as-Code tools, such as API Gateway, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, IAM, and CDKKnowledge of observability, tracing, and system performance best practices for distributed backend systems
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate with distributed teams
Nice to Haves:
- Experience with data streaming tools such as Kafka
- Experience operating at scale — high-throughput, data-intensive, or large-scale distributed systems
- Cybersecurity domain experience — IAM, access control, security‐adjacent products, or experience building for security teams
- Designing access control systems, such as Role‐Based Access Control (RBAC)
- Experience with version control, CI/CD, and build systems (e.g., GitHub Actions)
- Familiarity with compliance and security standards such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, or CPRA in cloud environments
- Startup experience and hustle
- Why You'll Succeed
- You take ownership end-to-end — from architecture and design through deployment and production support
- You move fast without breaking things — high‐velocity delivery with a track record to prove itYou can mentor and elevate the engineers around you
- You thrive in ambiguity and can independently execute complex tasks with minimal direction
Before you apply
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Your profile is current
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A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
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Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.