Senior Software Engineer - Data Platform Team

Surf AI is building the world’s first context-driven, agentic security platform. We focus on systems that don’t just surface risk, but actively help organizations resolve it.

Surf is backed by Cyberstarts and Boldstart Ventures, investors behind category-defining security companies, and founded by repeat entrepreneurs with deep experience in identity, security, and enterprise risk.

We’re a small, senior team working at the intersection of security, AI, and distributed systems. Our work blends agentic systems with data-driven analysis and applied security research to operate safely in real enterprise environments.

Who are we looking for?

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Data Platform team.
In this role, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and implementing a scalable data platform capable of processing and analyzing massive volumes of events and connections every day. This platform will serve as the foundation of our advanced cybersecurity research models, supporting batch and real-time data streaming, complex data modeling, machine learning pipelines, and large language models (LLMs).

What you'll do

• Architect and Build: Design and develop the data architecture, including data lakes, warehouses, and data pipelines.
• Data Integration: Create and manage pipelines for ingesting and processing large-scale, complex datasets from diverse sources, ensuring data quality and consistency.
• Data Orchestration: Manage and automate data workflows using orchestration tools.
• Database Management: Oversee the implementation and optimization of database services, including indexing, aggregations, partitioning, and high-performance query execution.
• Scalability & Performance: Ensure that the data platform scales efficiently and maintains high performance under load.
• Machine Learning & LLM Integration – Collaborate with data scientists to integrate and optimize ML and LLM workflows within the data architecture, while also supporting real-time servicing of RAG pipelines and ML-driven features.
• Collaboration: Work closely with data scientists, engineers, and cybersecurity experts to align data architecture with business needs and research goals.
• Innovation: Stay ahead of emerging technologies and trends in big data, cloud services, and cybersecurity to continuously enhance our data platform.

Required Skills & Experience

• Proven Expertise in Large-Scale Data Systems: Demonstrated experience in designing and building large-scale data architectures from scratch using advanced cloud technologies (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Backend Development Experience: Extensive experience in backend development for complex, data-driven systems, ensuring seamless integration and high-performance data processing.
• Strong Data Modeling Background: Proficient in hands-on developing complex data models and schemas to support real-time and batch processing.
• Experience with Streaming Data: Hands-on experience with streaming data technologies (e.g., Apache Kafka, Flink, or Spark Streaming) for processing high-velocity data streams.
• Database Management: Deep understanding of modern database technologies, including graph databases, NoSQL, SQL, and NewSQL databases, and experience optimizing query performance and database operations at scale.
• Data Security and Governance: Knowledge of best practices in data security, encryption, and governance to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive information.
• Ensure Code Quality and Reliability – Implement robust testing strategies and maintain high code quality standards through CI/CD practices.
• Experience with microservices, k8s, terraform - Advantage.
• Experience with data orchestration tools: Dagster, apache airflow - Advantage.

Why Join Us?
If you want to work on foundational systems, ship AI into production, and help define how agentic security actually operates, this is an opportunity to do it early and with real ownership.