Founding Engineer (Backend)

Triage is an applied research lab building adaptive security and safety alignment infrastructure for AI systems: defending against novel attack vectors and catching misalignment at inference-time in deployed systems. In December 2025, Triage raised a $1.5M pre‑seed round led by BoxGroup. We operate as an inference proxy — base URL swap, transparent to the customer's SDK. Every request in our customers' production flows through us. Our latency budget is measured in single‑digit milliseconds on the fast path. Our team is small, technical, and in‑person. We like people who are truth‑seeking, opinionated about systems, and ship. About the Role We're hiring a Founding Engineer (Backend) to own the systems that every customer request flows through. The work spans the proxy path itself, the per‑tenant isolation layer that makes our detection cascade possible, and the deployment surfaces (VPC, on‑prem, eventually air‑gapped) that unlock regulated enterprise buyers. This is not a "backend for a SaaS" role. Correctness and latency are both load‑bearing. When a customer points their SDK at us, we are in the hot path for every model call their agents make. What you'll do Own the dual‑pass detection pipeline: sub‑millisecond fast‑path filtering with async deep‑pass validation, including the tail‑latency and correctness guarantees under load Build and maintain the inference proxy: streaming, multi‑provider routing across frontier and open‑weight models, retry semantics, auth, per‑tenant isolation Ship per‑tenant LoRA serving infrastructure and the DPO feedback loop that turns triaged production alerts into per‑customer adapter improvements Deliver enterprise deployment surfaces — VPC from day one, on‑prem for regulated customers, air‑gapped where required Own the data pipeline connecting production telemetry back to adapter training and evaluation infrastructure You may be a fit if You build production‑grade distributed systems where latency and correctness both matter. Inference infrastructure, API gateways, proxy systems, CDN edge, or security‑adjacent platforms all map well. Deep systems fluency — you reason naturally about tail latency, backpressure, head‑of‑line blocking, and why adding a retry usually makes things worse Strong in Python, and in at least one of Go, Rust, or C++ for performance paths You've shipped VPC or on‑prem deployments, or you're genuinely excited to learn. This will be a significant part of the job. You understand why security infrastructure is architecturally different from SaaS, and why cloud‑only is disqualifying for our customers Currently pursuing a Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD, or prior industry experience. Either works — we care about what you've built. #J-18808-Ljbffr