About the role
The Role
Our Message Security Detection team at Abnormal operates at massive scale, powering critical security infrastructure that processes 10B+ emails per week (~35 TB of data daily), while also building a new real-time Threat Intelligence platform from the ground up. What makes this opportunity unique is the combination of zero-to-one product development and enterprise-scale engineering challenges from day one, involving real-time data streaming, low-latency backend systems, and large-scale search and indexing. This is a zero-to-one initiative focused on streaming critical security data to enterprise teams at scale. As an SWE-2 on this team, you won't just be executing on a roadmap, you'll be helping us find the problems that aren't on it yet. We are looking for a backend engineer with a builder mindset who thrives in an environment where they can take ownership and help define the technical path forward.
What You Will Do
- Build & Scale: Develop and maintain high-performance backend services using Python or Golang.
- Stream Real-Time Data: Build and optimize streaming architectures to handle live threat intelligence with low latency.
- Search & Indexing: Implement and tune OpenSearch/Elasticsearch layers to ensure massive datasets are searchable and actionable.
- Define the "How": Take high-level goals and translate them into technical specs and clean, maintainable code.
- Cloud Ownership: Manage your own deployments and infrastructure within AWS/EKS.
- AI-Augmented Development: Use AI tools to speed up development cycles and automate routine backend tasks.
- Collaborative Innovation: Work closely with the team to identify architectural gaps and proactively suggest improvements.
Must Haves
- 3–5 years of production experience in backend development and systems design.
- Hands-on experience with Kafka, Kinesis, or similar message brokers/streaming platforms.
- Proven experience working with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch at scale.
- Deep familiarity with AWS (highly preferred) and mandatory production experience with EKS (Kubernetes).
- Proficiency in Python or Golang and solid experience with Postgres.
- Builder mindset: comfortable with "zero-to-one" challenges and defining requirements when specs are loose.
Nice to Have
- Frontend Basics: Familiarity with React/TypeScript for building internal tools or data visualizations.