Staff Software Engineer - AI & Agentic Security - Bangalore (India)

<h2>About Operant AI</h2> <p>Operant AI is the only complete agent defense platform — offering four of the most important products at the forefront of securing AI in the world today: Agent Protector, Endpoint Protector, AI Gatekeeper™, and MCP Gateway. Together, they form the most comprehensive runtime defense suite available for enterprises deploying AI at scale, protecting every layer from infrastructure to LLMs to agentic workflows.</p> <p>Operant is the only vendor recognized across all five of Gartner's most critical AI security reports. Backed by leading Silicon Valley VCs including Felicis and SineWave Ventures, we're on a mission to make AI deployment fast, frictionless, and secure.</p> <p>We're hiring a senior engineer to join our growing APAC engineering team in Bangalore — a core backend contributor to the global product, with meaningful in-region technical depth for our most strategic regional accounts.</p> <h2>The Role</h2> <p>This is a senior backend software engineering role contributing directly to Operant's AI and Agentic security products. The primary focus is product engineering — roadmap features, system improvements, and shared product work alongside the rest of the engineering team. You also participate in the engineering on-call rotation and handle live debugging when customer-facing issues arise in your region.&nbsp;</p> <p>You'll work closely with Operant's CTO, founding engineering team, and the Customer Success team for APAC, with significant autonomy across timezone gaps. This is a high-visibility role at a fast-moving AI security startup — a lean, high-caliber team where the autonomy is significant by design.</p> <h2>What You'll Do</h2> <h3>Backend Software Engineering</h3> <ul> <li>Design, build, review, and ship features powering Operant's products alongside the rest of the engineering team</li> <li>Own significant systems or components end-to-end — architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, operation</li> <li>Raise the technical bar through code review and contribute to architectural decisions on shared core systems</li> </ul> <h3>Technical Depth In-Region</h3> <ul> <li>Provide live debugging and engineering depth for strategic APAC customers during their business hours</li> <li>Participate in the engineering on-call rotation, with primary responsibility for customer-facing issues during APAC hours</li> <li>Ship contained fixes and small features independently; coordinate with US engineering on anything architectural or cross-cutting</li> <li>Make the call on what gets escalated to the US team overnight vs. waits for morning, and produce comprehensive async handoffs when escalating</li> </ul> <h3>Customer and Roadmap Partnership</h3> <ul> <li>Partner with the APAC Customer Success Team as their L2/L3 escalation path and technical partner</li> <li>Join key deployment milestones, architecture reviews, and QBRs/EBRs when product depth is required</li> <li>Translate field observations into product improvements; validate feasibility of regional feature requests and present synthesized feedback in the monthly product review</li> </ul> <h3>Operating Across Timezones</h3> <ul> <li>Operate with autonomy across a 12–14 hour gap from the US team, with disciplined async communication</li> <li>Available during overlapping hours with Pacific Standard Time (PST) for global engineering meetings and synchronous work with US-based leadership</li> </ul> <h2>What You'll Bring</h2> <h3>Required</h3> <ul> <li>8+ years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 3 years at senior, staff, or principal level shipping production systems at scale</li> <li>Strong backend skills in one or more modern languages used in cloud infrastructure (Go, Rust, Python, or similar)</li> <li>Hands-on experience with on-call rotations and production incident response — debugging live customer-facing issues and shipping the underlying fixes</li> <li>Deep hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and container security across AWS, Azure, and GCP</li> <li>Strong working knowledge of runtime security, API security, CNAPP, or cloud workload protection</li> <li>Hands-on experience with at least one of: MCP, agentic AI platforms, LLM orchestration, or AI agent security — or strong evidence you can pick it up quickly</li> <li>Proven track record operating as a senior IC with significant autonomy — owning systems, making consequential technical decisions, and bringing others along through documentation and code review</li> <li>Experience working across timezones with disciplined async habits — clear written communication, escalation criteria, comprehensive handoffs</li> <li>Customer-facing technical experience — debugging live with customers and translating technical realities for senior security audiences</li> <li>Conversant with AI tooling and and harnessing AI products in a way that preserves a strong and reliable software engineering discipline</li> <li>Based in Bangalore, willing to travel across APAC for strategic customer engagements (10–20%)</li> <li>Available during overlapping hours with PST for regular synchronous work with the US team</li> </ul> <h3>Preferred</h3> <ul> <li>Background in operating production cloud systems at scale — strong operational instincts, monitoring, alerting, and reliability practices</li> <li>Prior experience at an early or growth-stage startup (Series A–C) where you've built engineering practices, not just executed them</li> <li>Hands-on with agentic AI frameworks — LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, or similar</li> <li>Background in offensive security, penetration testing, or red teaming</li> <li>Prior experience with self-hosted enterprise deployments at major accounts</li> </ul> <h2>Why Operant AI</h2> <ul> <li>Forefront of the industry — AI security is the defining enterprise challenge of this decade, and you'll be solving it as a core contributor to a leading platform</li> <li>Direct founder access — work closely with Operant's CTO and engineering leadership on the region's most strategic accounts and on the global product roadmap</li> <li>Early in APAC — join a growing regional team with outsized influence on how Operant operates engineering across timezones as we scale</li> <li>Lean team, outsized impact — tight, high-caliber team where your contributions are visible and your growth is real</li> <li>Real engineering, not field engineering — you ship to the shared product codebase, not to a customer-specific fork</li> <li>Competitive senior compensation — base salary, performance bonus, equity, and benefits benchmarked to Bangalore's senior technology market</li> </ul> <p>Operant AI is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diverse backgrounds and are committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work.</p> <p><br><br></p>