Role description
Senior Software Engineer- Backend (Product & Cloud Security)
YoodliYoodli helps people get measurably better in their careers. We help individuals achieve this by helping them land their job, onboard at their companies, learn new skills, practice a speech, sales pitch or difficult conversation, and then take your Yoodli coach with you from one role to the next. For organizations, this means helping you upskill your entire workforce for the AI Future.
We’ve always believed in the human potential. In 2021, Esha and Varun started Yoodli as an AI communication coach - to help people communicate with confidence. Since then, our users have used Yoodli for so much more: to learn new concepts through AI Roleplays, practice different kinds of conversations (sales pitches, job interviews, manager conversations), and even use Yoodli as their personal coach to help them learn to use Gemini, Claude or other AI Tools. It’s why we expanded our technology to be the AI Platform for Human Skills.
Who We Are
Our team includes former employees from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tableau, and beyond, united by a passion for empowering people using AI. We're headquartered in the heart of Seattle, and we're having a lot of fun along the way. Our culture is built on failing fast, iterating constantly, and taking bold bets. We value humility, authenticity, and a can-do-attitude.
We’re backed by Madrona, Neotribe the Allen Institute for AI, Cercano, and have raised over $60M to date.
Our customers include Google, RingCentral, Databricks, Snowflake, Sandler Sales, Dale Carnegie, Toastmasters, and users in over 150 countries. We’ve been featured in Forbes, Fortune, WSJ, Geekwire, ZDNet, and several other outlets (www.yoodli.ai/press). You can try the platform for free at www.yoodli.ai and learn more about us in this TED Talk.
About this team
You’ll operate as part of our Platform team, with a specific focus on cloud and operational security. You’ll work on problems including active monitoring and defenses, privilege escalation flows, secrets/key management, dependency and vulnerability management, BYOK capabilities, securing an AI product, and the engineering behind ensuring our enterprise customer data remain secure.
This is a dedicated security role - one that’ll extend into general backend and in-product engineering. You'll ship work alongside the rest of the team. You'll be the engineer who focuses on security improvements and changes, who partners with our security and compliance leadership, and who spots a trust boundary problem in a design review before it ships.
Because we're a startup, the surface is wide. You'll have real ownership and the chance to set the standard for how a company our size does this well.
What you'll work on
- Authentication, authorization, access controls
- Data isolation and data loss prevention
- Active threat monitoring and defenses
- Secrets management, key rotation, and secure-by-default patterns other engineers build on
- Vulnerability and dependency management
- Audit logging and the data plumbing behind customer security and privacy requirements
What we're hoping you bring
Mission alignment: You believe in our vision and care deeply about helping people achieve more by communicating better
Backend expertise: You have strong experience building scalable, reliable backend services that power great user experiences
A security mindset: You think in terms of trust boundaries, blast radius, and failure modes without being asked to. You've been the person on a team who catches the thing everyone else missed
Pragmatism: You right-size solutions. Security that grinds the company to a halt isn't good security - you know how to pick the controls that matter and skip the theater
Craft and quality: You hold yourself to a high bar for code quality and system design, and you make the engineers around you better
About you
- 5+ years of professional development experience, shipping production code
- Strong backend capabilities: you've owned services end-to-end and have a track record of delivering in fast-moving environments
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and Infrastructure as Code
- Proficiency in TypeScript, Python, or equivalent languages - with the ability to debug complex distributed systems
- Experience applying security fundamentals in a professional environment, and the judgment to apply them proportionally
- Clear communicator who works well across engineering, product, and compliance, and who gives and receives feedback well
- You understand how your work connects to business outcomes and user impact
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
- Ability to be on-site in our Seattle, WA office 3 days a week (M, T, Th)
Extra credit experience
- Building in support of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or similar) as an engineer
- Multi-tenant SaaS at enterprise scale
- NoSQL databases and Kubernetes
- Google Cloud Platform
- Responding to enterprise security questionnaires or customer security reviews
What's in it for you?
Huge impact opportunity: Define technical strategy and build foundational systems at a fast-growing startup. Work directly with the founding team and shape the future of the AI platform for human skills
Competitive compensation: Significant equity opportunities at a venture-backed company
Base compensation: $160k - $190k