Staff Software Engineer, Managed Scanning

About Semgrep

Semgrep, the leader in code security for builders, empowers invention without friction. Teams catch, flag, and fix real issues before they ship, powered by security that learns as they build. Semgrep secures code as it’s written and provides guardrails that pave the road for developers to move fast and stay secure. Built for builders and trusted by security, Semgrep lives where developers work, delivering fixes without breaking flow, and giving security teams visibility, control, and confidence. Semgrep gets smarter as you build, with AI that learns your context to cut false positives and prioritize reachable vulnerabilities, validated by 95% of security reviewers across 6M+ findings. Semgrep makes zero false positives a reality with AppSec teams triaging 80% fewer false positives across Code and Supply Chain, dramatically shrinking the backlog.

Founded in San Francisco and backed by Menlo Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, Semgrep is recognized by Gartner in Application Security Testing and is trusted by leading organizations, including Snowflake, Dropbox, and Figma. Learn more at semgrep.dev.

About the role

As a backend engineer on the Semgrep Managed Scanning team (SMS), you’ll build systems that help our customers seamlessly adopt Semgrep and are the beating heart of the company - our scanning infrastructure. Our team’s mission is to provide a best-in-class scanning experience while continually improving the usability, speed, and reliability of our products. We are responsible for the systems that drive the lifecycle of a Semgrep scan from scheduling through execution to storage and processing of findings. On this team you'll have an opportunity to work across several layers of our stack including our task processing systems and various web service backends. You'll play a key role in architecting and implementing Elasticsearch as a new layer in our infrastructure, building the search and analytics capabilities that will power the next generation of our findings storage and retrieval systems.

Additionally, you’ll learn about the application-security space, mentor more junior developers, collaborate with product managers and other engineers to create security tools our customers love, architect systems for storing and maintaining sensitive data, and help us surface those data back to our users to help them understand their individual security posture. Through Semgrep’s culture of transparency, you’ll see and influence the decisions that make a startup successful. Your decisions will be key to making Semgrep a world-leading static-analysis project, giving you lasting influence not only at Semgrep, but in the world’s developer community.

You will:

• Help set technical and product direction, collaborating with the team to determine the future of the product, what features to build, and how to build them

• Plan and execute major initiatives end-to-end, from design, through to implementation, and deployment

• Ensure continual, high-availability operation of services using modern site-reliability practices, including detailed observability and participation in an on-call rotation

• Advise and mentor other engineers via thoughtful code reviews, planning discussions, technical documentation, and formal mentorship

You are ideal for this role if you have:

• 6+ years of experience writing production software and building web applications. Our stack includes Python, Go, Postgres, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, and more.

• Experience developing task-based workloads on top of Kubernetes, or similar frameworks.

• Excitement about building for customers, learning their needs, iterating fast, and seeing your solutions solve their core problems

• Excellent and proactive communication, both verbal and written

Some examples projects you might work on include:

• Implementing dynamic Kubernetes resource tuning for scans

• Reducing scan start latency to improve customer scan experience

• Implementation of Elasticsearch to reduce latency of search workloads

Compensation

The estimated starting annual salary range for this position is $202,000-$238,000 USD. The actual base salary will be determined based on a number of factors, which may include job-related skills, relevant experience, qualifications, location, internal equity, and market data. In addition to base salary, total compensation may include equity, variable compensation, and benefits. We view equity as a meaningful part of our compensation philosophy and a way for employees to share in the long-term value they help create.

What we offer

Our goal is to competitively and fairly compensate every Semgrep employee with a system that equally rewards those who are vocal and those who are less comfortable making demands during the final steps of the hiring process. To that end, we generate internal compensation bands that are used when discussing and negotiating salaries. We update these based on market data to make sure they’re above the average for comparable roles.

We also invest in our employees’ well-being and long term success with comprehensive health plans, generous vacation time, 401k, learning stipends, and more. Our benefits are for everyone, so that you’re taken care of, and we work with individuals to make sure they have what they need, whether that’s quiet work space, adjusted hours, or something else.

Who we are

We have people from France and the Philippines, physics and philosophy, formal methods research and full fledged corporations. We’re new parents and new grads, aspiring authors and aspiring Americans, dog lovers and dogfooders. We get together often to bike, bake, and meet up in parks. In our interactions, we believe respect and honesty go hand in hand, and prioritize both.

Semgrep is an equal-opportunity employer seeking a diverse range of backgrounds. We value who you are — including your cultural heritage, your socioeconomic status, your age, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your disabilities. We value what’s vitally important to you — your family, your religion, your politics. We value what you love in this world — your music, your weekend pursuits. We believe in welcoming varied professional backgrounds, educations, and interests. If you’re exceptional in your role, believe in Semgrep’s mission, and treat Semgrep’s values as your own, you belong here.

Please Note: For US-based roles open to remote work, we are currently able to hire employees in the following states only: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.