Are you an engineer who sees the future and builds the blueprints to get there? Do you thrive on solving the most complex distributed systems challenges, where the problems are ambiguous but the impact spans an entire company? Are you ready to define the long-term technical vision for a platform that processes petabytes of security data to stop attackers in their tracks?
If so, we are looking for a Distinguished Engineer (Software Architect) to be the technical visionary for our Ingest and Detection Data Platform at Expel. This is our most senior individual contributor engineering role, with a company-wide scope of impact. You will be a key architect for the entire ecosystem that powers our security mission—from the front door where all data arrives, through the real-time processing and enrichment engine, to the point where it’s ready for analysis.
At Expel, we’re on a mission to make security easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to continuously improve. As the Architect for our ingest & detection data platform, you will make the foundational decisions that enable us to protect our customers at an ever-increasing scale for years to come.
What Expel can do for you: - Provide the opportunity to own the technical vision for a business-critical, petabyte-scale data platform with company-wide impact.
- Give you the autonomy to solve our most challenging, long-term technical and business problems.
- Surround you with a team of brilliant Principal and Senior engineers who are eager for your mentorship and leadership.
- Position you to have a profound and lasting impact on Expel's technology, products, and business success.
What you can do for Expel: - Guide architectural decisions across multiple teams, unblocking complexity and ensuring interoperability. Partner with product, engineering, and compliance teams to ensure platform capabilities meet business and regulatory needs.
- Act as the ultimate technical guide for multiple engineering teams, ensuring their work aligns with the long-term strategy.
- Make the critical design and technology choices that will ensure our platform remains scalable, resilient, and ahead of the curve.
- Define the blueprint for our data platform's future, creating the architectural vision and technical roadmap for the next 2+ years that will influence the entire engineering organization.
- Architect our data lakehouse using AWS services like S3, Iceberg, Glue, and LakeFormation
- Define patterns for ingestion, transformation, normalization (e.g. OCSF), and governance across billions of records
- Mentor our most senior engineers, helping to grow the next generation of technical leaders at Expel. Jump in when needed to code a POC, debug a platform issue, or mentor an engineer through a tough design problem.
- Represent Expel's technology in the broader community, influencing the industry and attracting top talent.
What you should bring with you: - A distinguished career building and designing large-scale, complex distributed systems that are foundational to a company's success. Strategic thinking around platform testing, security guardrails, and identity management
- A strategic mindset, a history of thought leadership, and the ability to create and communicate a compelling long-term technical vision.
- Mastery of architectural patterns, observability, monitoring strategies, and secure software development practices.
- A passion for mentoring other senior and principal-level engineers and a track record of cross-team influence.
- Expertise inGo and/or Python, and a mindset for reliability with a history of improving testing culture.
- Deep expertise in cloud-native data architecture, especially usingAWS (S3, Glue, LakeFormation), and experience designing and optimizing modern data lake tables using Iceberg or Delta Lake.
- Hands-on experience with Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake; schema evolution and partitioning best practices
- Familiarity with distributed processing (Spark, Flink) and logging/observability platforms (e.g. ElasticSearch, DataDog)
- Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering experience. Experience in the cybersecurity or a regulated industry is a major plus.
Additional notes: The base salary for this role is $191,800 - $278,100 + bonus and equity.
At Expel, our employee benefits reflect our commitment to our crew. Unlimited PTO, equity for everyone, work location flexibility, up to 24 weeks of parental leave, and excellent health benefits are some of the ways we care for our Expletives.
We’re only hiring those authorized to work in the United States. We do not currently sponsor immigration visas.
We're an Equal Opportunity Employer: You'll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.
We’ll ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please let us know if you need accommodation of any kind.
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