Senior Design Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 21, 2026. First seen by Alion on Jul 14, 2026. Petra Security scores B on the Alion truth index.
Who We Are
We’re on a mission to stop the most dominant cyberattacks on the planet.
Cybersecurity titans are born when a new attack vector overwhelms existing defenses. When ransomware ran rampant, CrowdStrike emerged as the category leader for securing user endpoints. Today, AI has made account compromise the #1 cybercrime. LLM-powered phishing messages get past email security, allowing attackers to compromise accounts and exfiltrate sensitive data in minutes. Incumbents can't keep up. They catch these attacks late, or miss them altogether.
Enter Petra, security for when no perimeter remains. We are building an AI-driven Detection and Response platform to catch and remove attackers before they can act.
We've grown very quickly, reaching mid-7-figures in ARR in under a year - we now protect over 2.5 million users across 10,000+ businesses. We price premium, yet have extremely low customer churn. Our customers consistently tell us that Petra is the best product they've ever used. You can see a demo here.
This is a rare chance to join early and help scale to $30M+ in revenue in the next 12 months.
Why This Role, Why Now
Ownership is everything here. Petra is a premium product and it's everyone's job to make sure it stays that way.
We have a growing customer base and a deep backlog of things they're asking us to build. We're expanding Petra into new user flows and product surfaces every week. When you ship something good, customers feel it fast, and every win builds Petra's reputation and earns the trust to do more for them.
You'll be the domain expert for how it feels to use Petra. You'll collaborate with our founders to decide what great looks like, then build it.
What You'll Do
Turn rough ideas into shipped product. Start from a loose Figma exploration, a customer problem, or a half-formed intuition, and take it all the way to production-ready UX.
Raise the bar for product quality, end to end. Visual design, interaction design, accessibility, responsiveness, performance, and the micro-details most people never get to. You care about how the whole thing fits together.
Prototype in code. When Figma is too slow or too static for motion, interaction, keyboard behavior, AI workflows, or information-dense views, you build the real thing to find the answer.
Show up as part of the customer's team. Talk to MSPs and security teams, map their workflows, find their time-sinks, and turn what you learn into UX they can feel.
Build foundational systems. Reusable primitives, design tokens, and component APIs: the difference between a one-off fix and a system that holds up as we grow 10x.
Our stack is React, TypeScript, Node, and Python... for now.
Who You Are
4+ years of design engineering experience, with meaningful time building production UX pre-LLMs.
You build for real problems. Everything you ship traces back to a real user need, not tech for its own sake.
Taste. You notice when something is off, and you know how to fix it.
Real empathy for users. You think about how people actually use software and you excel at putting yourself in our users’ shoes.
Comfort with ambiguity. Give you a vague product area and you'll form an opinion, try a few things, get feedback, and ship.
You like both design and engineering. To you it's all one craft.
Frontend range. You write clean, fast production React, and you go deeper than the UI layer when a problem calls for it. Performance-sensitive UI work is a plus.
You use AI tools well. They help you move faster and try more, without doing your thinking for you.
A bias to ship. You move fast without dropping the bar.
Complexity is earned. You reach for the simplest thing that works, and you only add complexity when the problem truly demands it.
Your own worst critic. You catch the flaws in your work before anyone else does.
A body of work. You’ve shipped products, side projects, open source, anything with a clear point of view. We care more about what you've built than how long you've been building.
The Team
We're small and high-caliber. Our founders are ex-Abnormal Security, Palo Alto Networks, and Bridgewater. Other early team members include:
A Sequoia-backed founder
An engineering leader from Anduril
Quants from Citadel and Point72
You'll work directly with people who are exceptional at what they do.
Benefits and Pay
Competitive salary. We pay top dollar for exceptional engineers.
Equity
Healthcare, dental, vision
Lunch and dinner when working in the office
401K
Commuting stipend
Equinox discount
Relocation support
This role is in-person, here in SF.
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Petra is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and welcome applicants of all backgrounds.