Senior Software Engineer – Security & Distributed Systems

About this role

Senior Software Engineer – Security & Distributed Systems

Location: United States — Remote Department: Engineering Company: RapidFort Employment Type: Full-Time U.S. Citizenship: Required

About RapidFort

RapidFort is a cybersecurity company focused on securing and optimizing modern software supply chains and cloud-native environments.

Our technology helps organizations reduce software vulnerabilities and attack surface by identifying and removing unnecessary components from containerized applications. RapidFort works with enterprise and U.S. public-sector customers operating highly complex, security-sensitive environments.

We are building systems that operate at the intersection of cybersecurity, distributed systems, Linux, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure .

The Role

RapidFort is looking for a Senior Software Engineer – Security & Distributed Systems to join our engineering team.

This is a hands-on backend engineering role for someone who enjoys solving complex systems problems and building production software that operates across distributed, containerized environments.

You will design and develop backend services and distributed systems that power RapidFort’s security platform, working with large volumes of software, vulnerability, container, and runtime data.

This is not an SRE or infrastructure operations position . We are looking for a software engineer who builds systems and products, with strong knowledge of the infrastructure and environments in which those systems operate.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain highly reliable backend services and distributed systems.

• Develop core components of RapidFort’s cybersecurity and software supply chain security platform.

• Build systems for processing, analyzing, and managing large volumes of security, vulnerability, package, container, and runtime data.

• Design scalable APIs, services, data pipelines, and internal platform components.

• Develop software that operates across Linux, containerized, Kubernetes, and cloud environments.

• Solve complex problems involving concurrency, performance, scalability, reliability, and distributed processing.

• Work with container images, software packages, dependencies, vulnerabilities, SBOMs, and other software supply chain data.

• Improve the performance and efficiency of systems handling large-scale security analysis and remediation workflows.

• Diagnose complex problems across applications, operating systems, containers, networks, and distributed services.

• Design systems with security, reliability, observability, and fault tolerance built in from the beginning.

• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested production code.

• Participate in architecture and technical design discussions.

• Review code and help establish strong engineering practices across the team.

• Work closely with security researchers, product managers, and other engineers to turn complex security problems into scalable product capabilities.

• Take ownership of projects from technical design through production deployment.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally building backend platforms or distributed systems.

• Strong programming experience with Python, Go, C++, Java, or similar backend/system-level languages .

• Deep understanding of distributed systems and production backend architecture.

• Strong knowledge of Linux systems and internals .

• Experience building APIs, backend services, microservices, or large-scale data-processing systems.

• Hands-on experience with Docker, containers, and Kubernetes .

• Experience designing software for cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP .

• Strong understanding of networking, processes, filesystems, memory, CPU utilization, and system performance.

• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases and large-scale data systems.

• Understanding of concurrency, asynchronous processing, queues, caching, and distributed workloads.

• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across multiple layers of a technology stack.

• Ability to independently own complex engineering problems from design through implementation.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Security Experience

You do not need to be a traditional security engineer, but you should be interested in building software that solves difficult cybersecurity problems.

Experience in one or more of the following areas is highly valuable:

• Software supply chain security

• Application or cloud security

• Vulnerability management

• Container security

• Kubernetes security

• Software composition analysis

• SBOMs and software dependency analysis

• CVEs and vulnerability intelligence

• Linux security

• DevSecOps

• Package management and software build systems

• Runtime security or workload analysis

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building security products or developer/security infrastructure.

• Experience working with very large software or vulnerability datasets.

• Deep understanding of container images, registries, layers, packages, and dependencies.

• Experience with Kubernetes internals and container runtimes.

• Knowledge of Linux package ecosystems such as RPM, DEB, APK, or similar.

• Experience with CI/CD systems and modern software build pipelines.

• Experience profiling and optimizing CPU, memory, disk, and network performance.

• Familiarity with open-source security tooling and vulnerability databases.

• Experience building highly available systems operating across multiple environments or clusters.

• Experience in a high-growth cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software company.

Compensation

The expected base salary range for this position is $150,000–$200,000 USD annually .

Actual compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s experience, technical depth, qualifications, geographic location, and overall fit for the position. Additional compe

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