Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems/Go

About this role

Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems/Go

Hybrid (Santa Clara, CA)

Full-time

$185,000 - $225,000 / yr

About Stairwell

Stairwell is building the future of threat detection and malware analysis. Our platform helps security teams find threats that others miss by transforming how organizations collect, analyze, and act on file-based intelligence. We're a small, high-impact team solving hard problems at the intersection of cybersecurity and large-scale data systems.

The Role

We're looking for a senior systems engineer who has personally designed and operated large-scale distributed infrastructure in production. You think from first principles, have real hands-on experience with storage or distributed systems, and naturally reason about tradeoffs and failure modes rather than reaching for the nearest familiar pattern. You enjoy building foundational infrastructure in ambiguous, still-being-defined environments, and you know how to use AI as a productivity tool without letting it substitute for your own engineering judgment.

You'll design and build the infrastructure that powers our threat detection platform — systems that process massive volumes of data with high reliability and performance. Engineers at Stairwell know their customer, know the business, and know the architecture well enough to make sound design decisions independently. We build AI-first, and expect you to reach for tools like Claude Code, Copilot, or similar as your default way of working — while knowing exactly where to trust them and where your own judgment has to lead.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate distributed systems in Go that handle large-scale data ingestion, processing, and analysis
• Work across the stack on storage systems, message queues, APIs, and data pipelines
• Collaborate with security researchers, subject-matter experts, and other engineers to turn threat detection concepts into scalable infrastructure
• Improve system reliability, observability, and performance as we grow
• Contribute to our engineering culture around AI-augmented development - sharing patterns, workflows, and lessons learned

What We're Looking For

• Strong experience building production distributed systems (consensus, replication, fault tolerance, etc.)
• Deep proficiency in Go; you write idiomatic, maintainable code
• Practical experience with AI coding assistants as part of your regular development workflow - not just experimentation, but daily use
• Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code: you know when to trust it, when to revise it, and when to write it yourself
• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership; we're a small team where engineers drive decisions
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), containerization, and infrastructure-as-code

Nice to Have

• Background in security, malware analysis, or threat detection
• Experience with large-scale data systems, particularly Google BigTable, Spanner, etc.
• Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects

Why Stairwell

• Hard technical problems with real security impact
• Small team, huge impact, high autonomy, low process overhead
• Opportunity to collaborate with world-class experts in cybersecurity
• Work remotely in the USA or Canada, or use our co-working space in Santa Clara to collaborate with teammates in-person