Senior Software Engineer, Evaluation Engine

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it.

Our Senior Software Engineers independently drive complex technical work, shape the systems and technical decisions within their teams, and enable other engineers to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions.

Vanta's product monitors the security posture of thousands of companies, pulling tens of millions of API calls of data per day, pushing information from hundreds of thousands of laptop agents, and running tests against that data continuously to identify potential security threats. Our infrastructure and tooling need to stay ahead of exponential growth in our customer base. As a Senior Software Engineer at Vanta, you'll drive complex projects across our technical stack, contribute to the technical direction of your team, and mentor other engineers. Your past experience will be leveraged to enable and accelerate Vanta's growth.

Visit our Vanta Engineering Blog https://www.vanta.com/all-categories/engineering to learn more about what our team is working on!

Tests are at the heart of how Vanta continuously monitors security and compliance for our customers. The Evaluation Engine team builds the runtime platform that powers these checks. We own how Tests are scheduled and executed, how their results are persisted and exposed, and the systems that keep this runtime reliable as Vanta grows.

In this role, you'll work on some of the core systems behind Vanta's Tests platform. You'll tackle problems around the reliability, correctness, and performance of Test execution, evolve the systems and abstractions that allow the platform to scale, and make it easier for other engineering teams to build on the Tests runtime. Many of these problems span multiple systems and teams and require a deep understanding of how the platform behaves in production.

What you’ll do as a Senior Software Engineer on the Evaluation Engine team at Vanta:

- Own complex projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, rollout, and operation

- Design and evolve the backend systems, APIs, and data models used to run Tests and process their results

- Improve the reliability, correctness, performance, and observability of the Tests runtime

- Investigate complex production issues, identify root causes, and build durable solutions

- Simplify existing systems and improve the abstractions and interfaces that other engineers build on

- Collaborate with engineers across Vanta on problems that span systems and tea

- boundaries

- Give thoughtful feedback in design and code reviews, communicate technical tradeoffs, and help other engineers make good decisions

- Mentor other engineers and contribute to the engineering culture of the team

How to be successful in this role

- Have strong experience building and operating reliable, scalable backend systems in production

- Have independently delivered complex technical projects where the problem or solution was not always well defined

- Have strong systems thinking and fundamentals in backend system design, APIs, and data modeling

- Be a strong debugger who can reason about correctness, reliability, performance, and scalability across complex systems

- Make effective technical tradeoffs, take ownership of systems in production, and improve mature systems incrementally

- Communicate technical decisions clearly, give thoughtful feedback on designs, and collaborate effectively with engineers across teams

- Experience with TypeScript, GraphQL, MongoDB, and observability tools such as Datadog is a plus

- Open to using AI to amplify their skills and strengthen their work - demonstrating curiosity, a willingness t