Dioptra (an Icertis Company) Senior Software Engineer

Dioptra (an Icertis Company) — Senior Software Engineer Type: Full-time | On-site 5 days/week | New York, NY (Brooklyn office) or San Francisco, CA Compensation: $180K–$280K + competitive equity Hiring count: 1 for this req (part of a 6-role push for a similar profile — see note) Visa sponsorship: Open to relocation; will transfer existing visas (e.g., H-1B, OPT); will NOT sponsor brand-new visas Reports to: Pierre Hadrien Arnoux, Co-founder / VP of Agentic AI, Icertis Hiring manager (Paraform): Farah Gasmi | Interview coordination POC: Doug About Dioptra (an Icertis Company) Dioptra builds contract-reviewing AI agents for enterprise legal tech. Backed by Y Combinator, it was acquired by Icertis in November. Rather than absorb the team, the Icertis CEO is building an entire business unit around the Dioptra founding team — its own sales, marketing, engineering, product, and support — with the explicit goal of preserving velocity. In the CEO's words, "I would rather be disrupted by my own startup than an external startup." The team continues to operate in high-velocity startup mode with enterprise-scale distribution and resources behind it. Founded: 2009 | Team size: 1,800 employees (Icertis) | Industry: AI, Enterprise, Law, Software DevelopmentWebsite: New York (Brooklyn) + San Francisco Why Candidates Should Join Work directly with the founders: Report straight to Dioptra's founding team with a real seat at the table — no layers of management between you and the people shaping the product. Greenfield backend ownership: Architect and build core systems from scratch with full ownership over technical decisions — not inheriting someone else's mess. Security work that actually matters: Own security-critical features like BYOK encryption, key management, and access controls for some of the world's largest enterprises (Microsoft, J&J, Mercedes-Benz), plus the SOC 2 program. Not checkbox compliance. AI agent work at the frontier: Build and secure LLM-powered agents and the infrastructure they run on, redefining how enterprises handle contracts. Backed and acquired — best of both worlds: YC- and Engineering Capital-backed, now acquired by Icertis. Startup energy and ownership with enterprise-scale distribution and resources. Massive market at an inflection point: Enterprise legal tech is wide open, and you'd be building the product going after it with a team carrying 10+ years of hands-on AI and commercial-contracting experience. Intake Call Summary The intake was a shared session covering three roles: a Design Engineer, this Backend / Senior Software Engineer ("security") role, and a separate AI Engineer role. Design Engineer content (React/Figma/design-first) is a different req and is excluded from scoring here. Company / mission YC-backed; acquired by Icertis in November. CEO is building the whole business unit around the Dioptra founding team to preserve startup velocity ("rather be disrupted by my own startup than an external startup"). Operates like a pre-seed / Series A company on ownership, agency, and time commitment despite the larger parent. What this role is "Really an AI and a backend engineer." Python required; AI means agentic experience specifically. Owns the security requirements the company takes on: the in-progress SOC 2 audit (implementations, controls, infra), customer BYOK requests (customers holding their own encryption keys), and securing AI-agent infrastructure (e.g., the infra patterns and MCP surfaces that agents run on). A fair amount of infrastructure work alongside backend — AWS or Azure, scaling, and some DevOps. Intake framing was backend-only : "I don't expect them to be doing front end or UI." (Conflicts with the role page, which lists production JS/TS and end-to-end agentic incl. a front-end component as Required — see flag.) Must-haves (Farah, verbatim priority): Python, AI agents, security. Nice-to-haves (Farah): the right mindset (high ownership / high agency); enterprise experience; startup experience; prior founding-engineer experience. (Flag: role page and rejection history harden startup/founding experience into a de facto hard gate — see Scoring Calibration.) Key calibration — NOT a pure security engineer. Doug course-corrected mid-call: he'd been sending pure security-engineer profiles, but the target is "really solid backend architecture and infrastructure thought process around data systems, with an eye for security and building secure systems." Farah agreed. Weight backend/infra architecture first, security mindset second. Company-type bar. "If it's not a tech / product company, it doesn't count." Non-tech core businesses #J-18808-Ljbffr David Joseph