Staff Software Engineer
Latent Defense · New York City
About Latent Defense
Latent Defense is building the world model for cybersecurity; the product graphs a company's entire system across all layers, identifies all attack paths and assigns criticality rankings, and provides remediation for each path. The team is building an autonomous system that rigorously models attack paths, orchestrates agents to validate each path, and remediates confirmed vulnerabilities at every step of the attack chain. Latent Defense is a small, seed-stage team scaling from a sharp early product into something that runs autonomously across real-world environments, from git repos to cloud deployments.
About the Role
Latent Defense is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help take its infrastructure from a scrappy MVP to a hardened, GA-ready product. This person will own customer deploys (Kubernetes, Docker), the telemetry platform, and the hardening and scaling work that comes with moving real customers into production. They'll operate with significant autonomy on a team that's still building out its staff-level bench, and will be trusted to redesign systems rather than just add to them.
This role is based in New York City. 3+ days/week in Nomad office
What You'll Do
Own deployment of Latent Defense's product into customer infrastructure, including Kubernetes and Docker-based environments
Build and harden the telemetry platform that lets the team measure and improve system-wide reliability and efficacy
Redesign infrastructure and backend systems as the company moves from an early MVP to a scaled, GA product
Operate with significant autonomy — take on ambiguous infrastructure problems and drive them to resolution without heavy direction
Use AI coding agents as a core part of your workflow, while keeping the underlying engineering judgment that agents can't replace
Partner with the rest of the engineering team (currently more junior) to raise the technical bar and unblock hard problems
Work closely with the Director of Engineering on architecture, technical direction, and delivery rigor as the team scales
What You Bring
7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with real infrastructure/backend depth
Fluency with TypeScript, Python, and Postgres
Experience deploying and supporting software directly in customer-owned infrastructure, not just centrally-hosted SaaS
A track record of redesigning or hardening systems as they scale, not just building new features
Comfortable operating with minimal direction in a small, fast-moving team
Agent-native — uses AI coding tools fluently, but has the underlying engineering instinct to know when to trust them and when not to
Experience at a seed-stage startup; founder experience is a strong plus
Nice to Haves
Prior experience at a cybersecurity or security-adjacent company
Experience building telemetry, observability, or hardening systems specifically
Experience with agent orchestration frameworks or MCP-style protocols
Experience deploying in 'bring your own cloud' and on-premises customer environments
What You'll Get
Base Salary: up to $240,000-$250,000
Equity: 0.5%-0.7%
A staff-level seat on a small, fast-moving team at a seed-stage security startup
Direct partnership with the founders and Director of Engineering
Top of market health insurance and unlimited PTO
Hybrid role based in NYC (Nomad, 26th & 6th), minimum 3 days/week in office
What We Value
Latent Defense believes cybersecurity should be proactive, not reactive. The team values engineers who think adversarially by default, build mental models of new domains quickly, and care as much about the lifecycle of what they build — observability, testing, scale, trust — as whether it works today.
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