XBOW is building an AI-powered system to autonomously discover, validate, and exploit vulnerabilities, aiming to put security ahead in the arms race against attackers who are already using AI. The company needs a Backend Research Engineer to design and implement the distributed infrastructure that powers this core engine.
Requirements
- Experience building and operating scalable, distributed systems
- Familiarity with AWS or similar cloud platforms
- You’re comfortable working with infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform or CDK) and see infra as part of the engineering system—not something separate from it.
- Eager to learn new tools, languages, and technologies as needed
- Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues, or async workflows
- Experience designing and optimizing relational databases (we use Postgres), and you know how to structure data for both performance and clarity.
- Background in systems programming, networking, or performance tuning
Responsibilities
- Design and build distributed backend systems that scale reliably and securely
- Work in TypeScript, Kotlin and Go (and pick them up quickly if you haven’t used them before)
- Deploy and operate services in AWS and other cloud providers.
- Own problems end-to-end—from design through deployment to production support
- Navigate ambiguity and help define how we build as much as what we build
- Collaborate closely with teammates across the stack, including AI researchers, Security researchers and frontend engineers
- Design and build distributed backend systems that scale reliably and securely
Other
- Comfort working in a fast-moving, early-stage environment
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work with incomplete information
- A thoughtful communicator who values clarity and simplicity
- Comfort working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment
- Remote (all team members are remote but we meet regularly and you’re supported to travel to collaborate with colleagues in person)
