Senior Software Engineer
Build the product surface of the Hardshell platform: the applications, integrations, and APIs security and data teams use every day. Enterprise-scale production experience matters more than a security background.
The role
You'll join a small engineering team that ships to paid pilot customers. Our AI security researchers develop the methods, and you'll turn them into software that security and data teams can deploy, trust, and run in their own environments. You'll work directly with our founding engineers and, when a pilot calls for it, with the customer.
What you'll do
- Build and own the customer-facing applications and APIs teams use to run exposure tests, review findings, and manage data hardening.
- Build integrations into the systems where customer data and AI already live: AI platforms, vector stores, document sources like SharePoint and Google Drive, identity providers, and observability stacks.
- Take methods from our AI security research team and make them production-grade, including in self-hosted and on-prem deployments.
- Own features end to end, from design through release and support in production with pilot customers.
- Help set the engineering practices we scale on, including code review, testing, and release.
What you bring
- 5+ years building production software, with meaningful time on systems used by enterprise customers.
- Strong backend and API design, and comfort working across the stack when the work calls for it.
- Experience integrating with third-party APIs and enterprise systems, including authentication, permissions, rate limits, and messy data.
- Experience with containerized deployments and cloud infrastructure.
- Clear written communication, and comfort working directly with a customer's engineers when a deployment needs it.
- U.S. citizenship.
Nice to have
- Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, or LLM application frameworks.
- Background in identity, access control, or security products.
- Experience shipping software into customer-controlled or air-gapped environments.
- Early-stage startup experience.
The details
- Location: Hybrid in Charlottesville, VA, or remote on Eastern Time.
- Compensation: Up to $175K base salary, plus equity and health coverage.
- Eligibility: U.S. citizenship is required for this role because of our federal work.
About Hardshell
Hardshell secures the data layer of enterprise AI. Our platform measures what an AI deployment can leak, catches extraction from AI knowledge bases as it happens, and hardens sensitive data before any model touches it. It is model-agnostic and runs in the customer's environment, so sensitive data stays where it lives.
We're a seed-stage team headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Our founders come from national security AI and cyber operations: our CTO spent five years advising the Department of Defense on AI security at the Joint AI Center and the CDAO, and our CEO served as an Army Cyber officer with assignments across U.S. Cyber Command and USSOCOM. We work with commercial customers in regulated industries and with federal and national security partners.
How to apply
Apply through the form on our careers page with your resume and LinkedIn profile. If more than one role fits, apply to the closest and say so in your note. Questions can go to careers@hardshell.ai.