What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Software Engineer position at Harrison Clarke?
We're partnering with a VC-backed cybersecurity startup building a platform that processes security data at massive scale. Think 100TB /day for enterprise customers across financial services, healthcare, pharma, and government.
The team is led by technical co-founders with deep roots in offensive security, exploit development, and cyber defense. Backed backed by DARPA, and with strong US government relationships, they're opening a Boston engineering office, and senior ICs to lay the foundation and help shape what comes next.
The Role:
Staff Software Engineer
You'll own significant parts of the backend systems powering a platform that covers the full security data lifecycle: collection, routing, storage, parsing, semantic enrichment, detection, and forwarding. The infrastructure (distributed Kubernetes) is largely in place — what's needed now is an engineer who can make the production workloads scalable, reliable, and battle-tested.
Day-to-day, you'll be building:
- Edge collectors — software that collects and receives data inside distributed Kubernetes environments
- Core backend services — distributed computation, pipeline orchestration, scheduling, and high-volume processing
- Production pipelines leveraging distributed Kafka, ZeroMQ, and file-based transport
At this scale, efficiency isn't optional - a sloppy implementation becomes a very expensive one. You'll be making architectural decisions independently and delivering solutions that solve real customer problems.
This is an IC role first, but as the Boston office grows, you'll naturally mentor incoming engineers and have a clear path into technical leadership if you want it.
What We're Looking For
- 6 years writing production software in a systems language — Go is ideal, Rust or Java/C/C also strong.
- 4 years deploying production workloads to a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Practical Kubernetes experience — you've run real things on it, not just read the docs
- You build the software that powers pipelines, not the YAML that configures them — this is a critical distinction
- Comfortable owning architecture and implementation end-to-end
Backgrounds that map well:
- Large-scale distributed backend systems
- High-volume data processing platforms
- Data pipeline / observability companies
- Cybersecurity experience is a bonus, but engineering capability comes first — the founders are realistic that the intersection of strong SWE and deep security expertise is rare
Salary : $170,000 - $250,000