About the role
The Role
Our Message Security Detection team at Abnormal operates at massive scale, powering critical security infrastructure that processes 10B+ emails per week (~35 TB of data daily), while also building a new real-time Threat Intelligence platform from the ground up.
What makes this opportunity unique is the combination of zero-to-one product development and enterprise-scale engineering challenges from day one, involving real-time data streaming, low-latency backend systems, and large-scale search and indexing. This is a zero-to-one initiative focused on streaming critical security data to enterprise teams at scale. As an SWE-2 on this team, you won't just be executing on a roadmap, you'll be helping us find the problems that aren't on it yet. We are looking for a backend engineer with a builder mindset who thrives in an environment where they can take ownership and help define the technical path forward.
What You Will Do
- Build & Scale: Develop and maintain high-performance backend services using Python or Golang.
- Stream Real-Time Data: Build and optimize streaming architectures to handle live threat intelligence with low latency.
- Search & Indexing: Implement and tune OpenSearch/Elasticsearch layers to ensure massive datasets are searchable and actionable.
- Define the "How": Take high-level goals and translate them into technical specs and clean, maintainable code.
- Cloud Ownership: Manage your own deployments and infrastructure within AWS/EKS.
- AI-Augmented Development: Use AI tools to speed up development cycles and automate routine backend tasks.
- Collaborative Innovation: Work closely with the team to identify architectural gaps and proactively suggest improvements.
Must Haves
- 3–5 years of production experience in backend development and systems design.
- Hands-on experience with Kafka, Kinesis, or similar message brokers/streaming platforms.
- Proven experience working with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale.
- Deep familiarity with AWS (highly preferred) and mandatory production experience with EKS (Kubernetes).
- Proficiency in Python or Golang and solid experience with Postgres.
- Builder mindset: comfortable with "zero-to-one" challenges and defining requirements when specs are loose.
Nice to Have
- Frontend Basics: Familiarity with React/TypeScript for building internal tools or data visualizations.
- Security Context: An interest in cybersecurity or experience working with security data.
- Tooling: Experience using modern AI productivity tools to increase engineering velocity.
Education
Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Applied Sciences, Information Systems, or a closely related engineering field.
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A note on AI in our process
Abnormal AI uses AI-assisted tools to help our recruiting team prepare for candidate interviews. These tools analyze resume content and role requirements to suggest interview questions and areas for the interviewer to explore.They do not make hiring decisions or screen candidates automatically. Every decision about a candidacy is made by a person. Further, if your application is successful and Abnormal AI makes a conditional offer of employment, we will carry out pre-employment checks which must be successfully completed to progress to a final offer. All processes and pre-employment checks are in line with prevailing legislation and Abnormal AI's policies relevant to our security and privacy standards.
Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please click here. If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please click here.