Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 16, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 13, 2026. Nightfall scores B on the Alion truth index.
About Nightfall:
Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce.
Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others.
About the role:
As a Senior Backend Software Engineer at Nightfall, you’ll enable us to deliver our platform reliably, securely, and at a massive scale. You’ll help architect low latency, real-time microservices that process & detect sensitive data at scale.
Responsibilities
Building highly available and secure authentication and API services.
Maintaining and evolving mission-critical internal databases and services.
Architecting, optimizing and operating high volume auto-scaling, reliable, real-time data infrastructure serving ML inferencing, agentic processing, etc.
Architecting agentic systems to perform highly concurrent workflows while optimizing LLM accuracy, cost and scalability.
Building Observability at scale for detailed insights into customer usage and performance.
Writing and maintaining documentation about internal and public services.
Requirements
Expertise in one or more systems/high-level programming languages (e.g. Python, Go, Java, C++) and the eagerness to learn more.
Grounded in Computer Science, Data Structures and Algorithms.
Experience running scalable (thousands of RPS) and reliable (four 9’s) systems.
Experience with developing complex distributed systems scaling to substantial data volumes or millions of users with production quality deployment, monitoring, and reliability.
Solid experience with building Search and Agentic AI systems at massive scale is a plus: ingestion, text summarization, semantic and classic search, prompt and context engineering, and agent orchestration. Experience with ML and evals is a plus.
Experience with large-scale distributed storage and database systems (SQL or NoSQL, e.g. Postgres, Cassandra)
Ability to decompose complex business problems and lead a team in solving them
Data Processing - experience with building and maintaining large scale and/or real-time complex data processing pipelines using Kafka, Flink, Snowflake, Hadoop or Zookeeper
6+ years of experience with proven technical leadership and prowess in scalable, distributed architectures
Tools We Use
Go
React
Python
Cassandra
Redis
Terraform
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS
Kafka
Envoy
Environment
Nightfall AI takes pride in being an equal-opportunity employer. We value a diverse and global talent pool and the collaboration that results from having a diverse and inclusive team. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our hiring decisions are based exclusively on merit, qualifications, and business needs.
Compensation
Employee compensation will be determined based on interview performance, level of experience, specialization of skills, and market rate. During the offer discussion, your recruiter will review the finalized base salary, bonus (for applicable roles), benefits & perks, and stock options as they’ll be reflected in the offer letter.