Senior Security Software Engineer

About Semgrep

Our mission is to make world-class software security available to everyone. This means building program analysis tools that are open source, easy to use, powerful, and fast. It also means building a team with security expertise and a passion for great developer experiences. Most of all, it means working with honesty and respect in a diverse community of dreamers and builders. We’ve redefined static analysis tooling by committing to all of these, and turned our project, Semgrep, into an essential safeguard for code at Snowflake, Dropbox, and more.

About the role

The Security Research team at Semgrep provides continuous operational and engineering support for multiple products here at Semgrep. As the Senior Security Software Engineer on the team, you will be a technical leader working alongside a group of dedicated, passionate, driven Security Researchers. You will empower others on the team through mentorship and guidance. In addition, you’ll work closely with our cross functional teams, bringing together multiple disciplines to push both engineering strategy and product strategy. In addition to collaborating cross functionally with our partners, you will own impactful large projects end to end and contribute to the engineering strategy of the team.

Through Semgrep’s culture of transparency, integrity, and respect, you will play a key role in helping to evolve this team from what it is now to what it needs to become as it prepares to tackle the challenges and exceed expectations for Semgrep’s next phase. You will consistently push the team by setting a high bar for execution and help foster a culture of inclusivity and trust. We are working hard every day to build a world class Application Security platform and the work you do will directly contribute to Semgrep’s mission to profoundly improve software security and reliability by making it cheap to make it expensive to exploit software.

What you’ll do

As a Senior Software Security Engineer, your responsibilities will include:

• Help the team scale our rule infrastructure through automation, improved observability and performance
• Engineer automation infrastructure and collaborate with our AI team to scale operational output
• Create Semgrep rules to help improve companies’ security posture
• Continuously learn about new programming languages and technologies, identifying their security features and potential vulnerabilities
• Work closely with a team of Program Analysis experts to drive the development of Semgrep’s core engine
• Shape the direction of Semgrep’s products through your Security and Engineering expertise
• Grow your contribution to the broader community and share your expertise through blog posts, conference talks, and other platforms.
• Promote a productive, engaging, diverse, and high accountability culture that embodies Semgrep’s core values

You are ideal for this role if you have

• Strong expertise in software security, including fundamental principles, best practices, and the ability to dive into nitty-gritty details
• Experience reviewing and writing code in one or more OOP languages, with a preference for Python
• A passion to build tools, prototype new ideas, and automate the world
• Motivation to raise the bar for security across various companies in the industry
• Solid background in cloud software development tools, technologies, and best practices (AWS, SQL, CI/CD, Observability, Databases)
• The ability to work independently and thrive in a high trust environment, breaking down tasks into short milestones and owning the outcomes
• Prior experience in a fast-paced, tech environment is helpful

You might spend a typical day:

• Building out workflow that ingest advisories and automate generation of rules
• Running a team wide office hours to facilitate discussions, debugging, and collaboration
• Working with the team, product management, and engineering leadership to prioritize evolving and scaling existing systems and building new features where appropriate
• Contributing to quarterly project goals
• Interviewing and mentoring current and future team members
• Implementing foundational architecture to set the team up for operational success
• Modifying and optimizing database syncs for our rules

Recent Team Initiatives

• Launching Reachability coverage for Kotlin and Scala by expanding internal tooling and engine capabilities
• Providing feedback to our AI based generator to assist in our research and rule generation workflows
• Launching fine-grained ACLs for enterprises

Compensation

Salary Range: $ 174,000-$205,000

Our compensation package includes equity and benefits in addition to salary.

Please note that the range listed is for someone based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What we offer

Our goal is to competitively and fairly compensate every Semgrep employee with a system that equally rewards those who are vocal and those who are less comfortable making demands during the final steps of the hiring process. To that end, we generate internal compensation bands that are used when discussing and negotiating salaries. We update these based on market data to make sure they’re above the average for comparable roles.

We also invest in our employees’ well-being and long term success with comprehensive health plans, generous vacation time, 401k, learning stipends, and more. Our benefits are for everyone, so that you’re taken care of, and we work with individuals to make sure they have what they need, whether that’s quiet work space, adjusted hours, or something else.

Who we are

We have people from France and the Philippines, physics and philosophy, formal methods research and full fledged corporations. We’re new parents and new grads, aspiring authors and aspiring Americans, dog lovers and dogfooders. We get together often to bike, bake, and meet up in parks. In our interactions, we believe respect and honesty go hand in hand, and prioritize both.

Semgrep is an equal-opportunity employer seeking a diverse range of backgrounds. We value who you are — including your cultural heritage, your socioeconomic status, your age, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your disabilities. We value what’s vitally important to you — your family, your religion, your politics. We value what you love in this world — your music, your weekend pursuits. We believe in welcoming varied professional backgrounds, educations, and interests. If you’re exceptional in your role, believe in Semgrep’s mission, and treat Semgrep’s values as your own, you belong here.