Staff Software Engineer - Detection Platform (GoLang) (Washington)

Cybercrime is growing, and more businesses are getting hit by threats that used to target only the biggest organizations. That pushes defenders like us to operate at the highest level, and it deepens our need for good people who want to make a meaningful impact.

Founded in 2015 by former NSA cyber operators, Huntress is a remote-first team working to make enterprise-grade cybersecurity accessible to businesses of all sizes. We work closely with security teams and service providers protecting complex environments, often without the time or headcount to handle it all. That's why we build our technology in-house and back it with a 24/7 human-led Security Operations Center (SOC). As a result, our platform is never disconnected from the experts who manage it, ensuring our customers protection.

Huntress now secures more than 5M endpoints and 14M identities worldwide. Those numbers keep growing because more businesses rely on us to help carry the load and operate with more confidence. Every day, you can see that commitment in how we stand with our customers and how we show up for each other.

About the Team

Huntress protects the small and mid-sized businesses that attackers assume cant afford a security team. The Detection Platform team builds the engines and pipelines that turn billions of raw telemetry events into the signals our 24/7 SOC acts on. Every detection Huntress ships, across endpoint, identity, SIEM, and third-party EDR, runs through systems this team owns. We measure ourselves on two things: time to detection and detection engine uptime.

About the Role

Were hiring a Staff Software Engineer to help build and rebuild these systems without disrupting the SOC that depends on them, and to make their behavior predictable under load. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: youll lead major workstreams, set direction that other engineering teams build against, and write and review production code every week.

What Youll Own

* Detection engine and pipeline modernization. Were rewriting our detection engine to support the full Sigma v2 specification, including stateful correlation of patterns across many events over time. In parallel, were reworking several existing detection pipelines and building new ones, moving off the bespoke per-product detectors weve accumulated and onto a common platform. Youll lead major workstreams across both and own the validation approach that proves a reworked pipeline still behaves like the one it replaces, so we can turn old paths off knowing we havent lost anything.

* Reliability and behavior under load. A detection pipeline that quietly stops producing signals is worse than one that crashes loudly, and detection volume spikes for reasons we dont always control. Youll build the guarantees that make quiet failure impossible: end-to-end latency measurement, liveness coverage, and alerting that fires when expected work stops arriving. Youll also build the mechanisms that keep a spike bounded and recoverable.

* Event schemas and data contracts. Our schema and transformer layer are what several other engineering teams build their detections against. Youll help drive toward a coherent internal standard and build the validation and drift-detection tooling that catches upstream changes before they break detections.

What Were Looking For

Required

* Deep experience designing, building, and operating production distributed systems at scale, primarily in Go, with the range to work across several layers of the stack.

* You have replaced or substantially re-architected a live, high-throughput system without breaking its consumers, and you can walk us through how you proved the new path was equivalent, staged the cut-over, and decided it was safe to retire the old one.

* Experience with high-volume event or data pipelines, and a good feel for how they behave under load: where things queue, where they fall behind, and what happens to correctness when they do.

* Strong operability instincts. You design observability in rather than retrofitting it, and youve built alerting that catches the absence of expected work, not just errors.

* Demonstrated technical leadership across team boundaries. Youve set a direction that other teams had to build against and raised the engineering bar around you, without needing positional authority.

* Judgment about production quality: when a system is good enough to ship, when it needs more evaluation, and when it shouldnt ship at all.

* Hands-on experience with AI coding tools, and a point of view on using them well, where correctness is a security outcome.

Strongly Preferred

* A background in security operations or security engineering: time spent writing or tuning detections, or working in a SOC. You know what makes a detection maintainable, how fast noise erodes a SOCs trust in its tooling, and why a missed detection is a different class of failure than a noisy one.

* Experience with detection-as-code or other rule- and DSL-driven systems, including the parsing and evaluation work that supporting a specification properly entails.

* Experience building platform tooling for non-engineer authors such as rule writers, analysts, and researchers, where the product surface is a language, an API, and a feedback loop.

* Ruby on Rails experience. Some of our pipeline and application code is Rails, and youll occasionally read and review Ruby. Its a nice-to-have, not a requirement; well help you ramp.

Our Stack

Youll work primarily in Go across our detection engines, pipelines, and the services around them, with Kafka, Temporal, Redis, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, and Kubernetes across AWS and Azure. Some of our pipeline and application code is Ruby on Rails. Detection logic is written in Sigma.

We dont expect prior experience with all of it, and were not screening on the list; Go is the one language well assess directly in interviews. You should be someone who likes being fluent across a broad stack rather than being specialized in one corner of it.

What We Offer:

* 100% remote work environment - since our founding in 2015

* Generous paid time off policy, including vacation, sick time, and paid holidays

* 12 weeks of paid parental leave

* Highly competitive and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits plans

* 401(k) with a 5% contribution regardless of employee contribution

* Life and Disability insurance plans

* Stock options for all full-time employees

* One-time $500 reimbursement for building/upgrading home office

* Annual allowance for education and professional development assistance

* $75 USD/month digital reimbursement

* Access to the BetterUp platform for coaching, personal, and professional growth