Lead Software Engineer (Backend Platform & Security Scanners)

At Escape, we build an automated security scanning platform that analyzes real customer applications at scale, surfacing high-signal, real-world vulnerabilities. Our challenge isn't simply to "run a scanner once" - it's to reliably run millions of isolated, efficient analysis tasks across wildly different application behaviors and always deliver accurate, production-grade results.

You'll join us as a pivotal leader, owning the core systems executing, scaling, and operating scanning workloads. You'll collaborate closely with Security Research (who bring detection logic and algorithms), transforming their insights into fast, safe, observable, and maintainable software.

Cofounders: CEO (Tristan Kalos) & CTO (Antoine Carossio) Team: 1 Head of Engineering, 18 Engineers, 3 Technical Leads, 3 Product Owners

What You'll Do

This role blends engineering management and deep technical leadership. You'll be accountable for:

• Mentoring and leading a small, high-caliber backend team (mid/junior engineers)
• Driving high standards for delivery, code quality, reviews, and engineering rigor while staying hands-on with the toughest problems
• Designing, building, and scaling our core backend systems for scanner execution-covering scheduling, isolation, resource governance, queueing/backpressure, and performance/cost predictability for high-throughput workloads (web crawling, file/API analysis, automation)
• Owning production outcomes end-to-end: reliability, observability, incident response, performance tuning, and minimizing flakiness in long-running scans
• Translating research detection logic into robust, maintainable, testable production components with clear interfaces, versioning, and safe rollout strategies, * Runtime: Containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS), supporting long and resource-intensive scans
• Scaling: Kubernetes Jobs & queue-driven autoscaling
• Web Automation: Playwright + headless Chromium
• Data: PostgreSQL, S3-compatible object storage, Redis (limited use)
• Messaging: Kafka
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud
• CI/CD & Infra: GitLab CI, Terraform

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, strong fundamentals, and a track record of delivering and operating production systems
• Expertise in Python for building reliable, maintainable backend services and execution engines
• Hands-on with workload processing (web scanning, crawling, file processing, background pipelines)
• System ownership: You've run critical systems in production, made reliability/performance trade-offs, and delivered long-lived maintainable platforms
• Scalability exposure: Experienced with large-scale, high-throughput, performance/resource-constrained systems
• Production mindset: Comfortable with observability, testing, versioning, pragmatic rollout strategies
• High autonomy & rigor: You set a high bar for yourself and the team, code quality, and documentation
• Startup drive: Eager to make a high-impact at a fast-growing, deep tech startup building the future of AI-powered cybersecurity

Bonus: Experience with security, web crawling, browser automation, or multi-tenant execution/sandboxing environments

Ready to build and scale the backbone of AI-driven security scanning?

• Significant equity (Stock Options/BSCPE) become a true stakeholder in our journey
• Top-tier health insurance paid 100% by Escape(Alan)
• Meal vouchers (Swile)
• Sport subscription (EGYM Wellpass)
• Budget for books & online courses to support your growth
• High-end equipment
• Free time to work on open source projects
• Opportunities to present your work at international conferences (RSAC, BSides, BlackHat, DEFCON, APIDays across global cities)