Staff Software Engineer

San Francisco, California, US Until 8/21/2026 H-1B sponsor history First posted March 27, 2025 Last posted March 27, 2025
Job description

Nightfall AI (www.nightfall.ai) is the unified platform that prevents data leaks and enables secure collaboration by protecting sensitive data and controlling how it's shared. For decades, legacy data leak prevention (DLP) solutions have failed to adequately protect sensitive information. Traditional DLP is outdated, intrusive, and complex - it wasn't designed for today's modern enterprise where users continuously share data across interconnected SaaS applications, endpoints, and now generative AI. Nightfall AI is the first AI-native DLP solution. We leverage AI to achieve twice the accuracy with a fraction of the false positives that overwhelm security teams. Nightfall does this without disrupting modern work patterns. Our AI-native platform spans sensitive data protection across SaaS, email, data exfiltration prevention on SaaS, endpoints, and data encryption. Nightfall's Developer Platform provides an open, flexible environment for developers to integrate our data classification and protection capabilities anywhere, including establishing trust boundaries for AI model building and consumption.

We are looking for an exceptional engineer to join our growing team at Nightfall. As a staff engineer, you’ll enable us to deliver our platform reliably, securely, and at massive scale. You’ll help architect low latency, real-time microservices that process & detect sensitive data at scale and will have opportunities for technical leadership. 

This is a hybrid role based out of our San Francisco office.
The base salary range for this role is 180-220k. 

Responsibilities

  • Oversee multiple cross-functional projects from conception to completion, ensuring alignment with business goals and customer needs.
  • Design and  implement new features ensuring security, user experience, and scalability.
  • Advise on new technologies and guide architectural decisions to enhance system performance and reliability
  • Mentor junior team members and enforce best practices in a fast-paced environment.
  • Writing and maintaining documentation about internal and public services 
  • Work effectively with other teams to support engineering programs and ensure seamless communication.
  • Participate in the team’s on-call rotation to ensure that product quality and performance SLAs are consistently met. Enhance processes and systems to continuously improve operations of the product.

Requirements

  • Minimum 7+ years of hands-on technical development experience
  • Experience programming in Go, C++, Java or related language
  • Experience with developing complex software systems scaling to substantial data volumes or millions of users with production quality deployment, monitoring and reliability.
  • Experience designing and building systems in a microservices-based architecture 
  • Ability to decompose complex business problems and lead a team in solving them
  • A foundational understanding of multi-threaded programming, concurrency primitives, and data structures
  • BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field

Bonus Points

  • Experience working in high growth venture-backed startups
  • Blog, teach, mentor, or help others learn outside of your day to day responsibilities
  • Familiarity with AWS and managed infrastructure
  • Familiarity with Docker/Kubernetes
  • Experience with ML model deployments and inferencing is a plus

About Nightfall:

Nightfall is a cybersecurity startup dedicated to helping organizations secure and manage their sensitive data. As a leading enterprise technology company, our product affects the personal data that people entrust businesses to store & process with care every day. Critical data in modern organizations is often sprayed across a broad set of cloud data silos, and it’s a herculean task for security & compliance teams to monitor, manage, and protect this highly sensitive data. Via machine learning, our product makes it easy for organizations to discover, classify, and protect this sensitive data across their cloud footprint - such as their corporate SaaS, data infrastructure, and even their own apps. In doing so, we prevent data leakage, provide unprecedented data visibility & protection across the cloud, and enable compliance. We’re a technology startup founded in San Francisco, well-funded by leading institutional investors like Bain and Venrock, and a cadre of security & IT leaders from Okta, Salesforce, Atlassian, Splunk, FireEye, and more. Learn more on our website www.nightfall.ai or by reaching out via email at [email protected].

About this role

Summary

Architect and develop scalable microservices for data protection platform.

Job title

Staff Software Engineer

Experience level

7+ years

Industry

cybersecurity

Location requirements

San Francisco, hybrid role with remote work allowed

Salary

180-220k

Visa sponsorship

H-1B sponsor history

Management role

Yes

Skills & keywords

Required skills

GoC++Javamicroservicesmulti-threaded programmingdata structuresBS/MS in Computer Science

Preferred skills

AWSDockerKubernetesML

Specializations

microservicesdata protectionsoftware developmentcloudAI
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

San Francisco, CA, USA

Hybrid City