Founding Product Engineer

Arcjet is hiring several founding engineers with experience building developer products.

Arcjet’s mission is to help developers protect their apps.

Developers care about security, but it’s yet another thing they need to pay attention to. Arcjet helps developers protect their apps against a range of security risks, so they can get on with everything else.

How we work

Remote-first, in-person regularly

We are set up as a remote-first, distributed company (US and Western EU timezones). However, in-person makes a big difference. We organize meetups 3-4 times a year for the whole team to travel to interesting locations, kick off new projects, join forces on hacking challenges, build the product, and get to know each other in real life.

Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time

Group chat is the best way to stress out your team. Although we use Slack, it’s primarily for quick discussions, socializing and sharing interesting things. We prefer thoughtful long-form posts as GitHub Discussions rather than long debates in chat. Slack messages are automatically deleted after 7 days.

We do not expect an immediate response (to chat or other messages) and you can choose when and whether to participate. If it will matter after today, don’t put it in chat - create a discussion instead.

Pay attention to the details rather than aiming for perfectionism

Knowing when you’re done is hard. We always aim to deliver the highest quality work, but we try to avoid perfectionism undermining our ultimate goals.

About the job

What you’ll do

• Arcjet is just getting started so you’ll be joining to help build out the initial product functionality. This will include designing and implementing the foundations on which Arcjet will grow into a security platform to help developers protect all of their applications.
• Writing detailed technical documentation about how to use the SDKs, the APIs, and the security functionality. Features aren’t “done” until they’re fully tested & documented.
• Bootstrapping the initial development processes, tooling, and infrastructure. This will include ensuring extensive test coverage, automated security analysis, CI/CD, infrastructure management and observability.
• You’ll operate the code you write i.e. you’re responsible for it once it goes into production. This will involve participating in the on-call rotation.
• Working with early testers and iterating rapidly on their feedback.
• Providing technical support to those early users.
• Collaborating with the rest of the team on all of the above → offering advice on areas of expertise, participating in design discussions, and conducting code reviews.

Requirements

• ≥5 years software development experience, with some of that at an early-stage startup. You’ll need to be comfortable with ambiguity & low-structure as we build up the company. You’ll be fully supported by the rest of the team, but this generally means you’ll also need to be self-directed → defining, building, and then owning large parts of the codebase.
• Experience building production systems with Go and/or Rust.
• Pragmatic approach to building software → you’ll know that at the early stages of product-building, lots of the code will be replaced within 12-18 months. You must understand how to balance “good enough” with ensuring security and quality.
• Strong English language abilities.
• In a US or Western EU timezone.

Bonus

These are not required, but it’ll be a nice bonus if you have experience with any of the following:

• Experience with TypeScript and/or React + Next.js.
• Experience building products for developers, with a particular understanding of what makes for a good developer experience.
• Experience building security products such as rate limiting, bot protection, web application firewalls, account takeover protection.
• An interest in software security, perhaps through completing challenges like on HackTheBox, competing in CTFs, or participating in bug bounty programs.
• Experience in a startup growing from 2 to 20 people.

Benefits

• Competitive VC-backed startup salary + equity.
• Home office allowance (desk, chair, etc) + we’ll buy you a new computer (if you want one)!
• Flexible paid annual holiday allowance (unlimited holiday doesn’t work).
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance (US).
• Spend half a day a week allocated to leveling up your security skills. To enable this, we’ll pay for a silver account on HackTheBox Academy to get access to their security courses. Complete the HTB Certified Bug Bounty Hunter path (exam optional, or if you don’t need the Academy account), and we’ll also pay for a HackTheBox Labs VIP account. You can also use this time for other security-related activities e.g. participating in bug bounty programs.

Apply

Email david@arcjet.com with a link to an online profile (GitHub, GitLab, SourceHut, LinkedIn, personal website, etc). Include a resume if you like, but it’s not required so long as we can find your work history (which can also be in the email message). Don’t worry about a cover letter - just say hello!