Software Engineer - Distributed Systems/Go

About Stairwell

Stairwell is building the future of threat detection and malware analysis. Our platform helps security teams find threats that others miss by transforming how organizations collect, analyze, and act on file-based intelligence. We're a small, high-impact team solving hard problems at the intersection of cybersecurity and large-scale data systems.

The Role

We're looking for a back-end engineer who thrives in complex distributed systems and has embraced AI-assisted development as a core part of their workflow. You'll design and build the infrastructure that powers our threat detection platform - systems that process massive volumes of data with high reliability and performance.

We are rapidly embracing AI-driven development, and expect you to be fluent with tools like Claude Code, Copilot, or similar. You should have strong opinions about where AI accelerates your work and where it doesn't. We also highly value the human-in-the-loop - engineers at Stairwell know their customer, know the business, and know the architecture well, so that they can design and build effective products quickly.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate distributed systems in Go that handle large-scale data ingestion, processing, and analysis

• Work across the stack on storage systems, message queues, APIs, and data pipelines

• Collaborate with security researchers, subject-matter experts, and other engineers to turn threat detection concepts into scalable infrastructure

• Improve system reliability, observability, and performance as we grow

• Contribute to our engineering culture around AI-augmented development - sharing patterns, workflows, and lessons learned

What We're Looking For

• Strong experience building production distributed systems (consensus, replication, fault tolerance, etc.)

• Deep proficiency in Go; you write idiomatic, maintainable code

• Practical experience with AI coding assistants as part of your regular development workflow - not just experimentation, but daily use

• Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code: you know when to trust it, when to revise it, and when to write it yourself

• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership; we're a small team where engineers drive decisions

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), containerization, and infrastructure-as-code

Nice to Have

• Background in security, malware analysis, or threat detection

• Experience with large-scale data systems, particularly Google BigTable, Spanner, etc.

• Contributions to open-source distributed systems projects

Why Stairwell

• Hard technical problems with real security impact

• Small team, huge impact, high autonomy, low process overhead

• Opportunity to collaborate with world-class experts in cybersecurity

• Work remotely in the USA or Canada, or use our co-working space in Santa Clara to collaborate with teammates in-person