Job Description

About Operant AI

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.

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.

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.

The Role

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.

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.

What You'll Do

Backend Software Engineering

• Design, build, review, and ship features powering Operant's products alongside the rest of the engineering team
• Own significant systems or components end-to-end — architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, operation
• Raise the technical bar through code review and contribute to architectural decisions on shared core systems

Technical Depth In-Region

• Provide live debugging and engineering depth for strategic APAC customers during their business hours
• Participate in the engineering on-call rotation, with primary responsibility for customer-facing issues during APAC hours
• Ship contained fixes and small features independently; coordinate with US engineering on anything architectural or cross-cutting
• Make the call on what gets escalated to the US team overnight vs. waits for morning, and produce comprehensive async handoffs when escalating

Customer and Roadmap Partnership

• Partner with the APAC Customer Success Team as their L2/L3 escalation path and technical partner
• Join key deployment milestones, architecture reviews, and QBRs/EBRs when product depth is required
• Translate field observations into product improvements; validate feasibility of regional feature requests and present synthesized feedback in the monthly product review

Operating Across Timezones

• Operate with autonomy across a 12–14 hour gap from the US team, with disciplined async communication
• Available during overlapping hours with Pacific Standard Time (PST) for global engineering meetings and synchronous work with US-based leadership

What You'll Bring

Required

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 3 years at senior, staff, or principal level shipping production systems at scale
• Strong backend skills in one or more modern languages used in cloud infrastructure (Go, Rust, Python, or similar)
• Hands-on experience with on-call rotations and production incident response — debugging live customer-facing issues and shipping the underlying fixes
• Deep hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, and container security across AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Strong working knowledge of runtime security, API security, CNAPP, or cloud workload protection
• 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
• 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
• Experience working across timezones with disciplined async habits — clear written communication, escalation criteria, comprehensive handoffs
• Customer-facing technical experience — debugging live with customers and translating technical realities for senior security audiences
• Conversant with AI tooling and and harnessing AI products in a way that preserves a strong and reliable software engineering discipline
• Based in Bangalore, willing to travel across APAC for strategic customer engagements (10–20%)
• Available during overlapping hours with PST for regular synchronous work with the US team

Preferred

• Background in operating production cloud systems at scale — strong operational instincts, monitoring, alerting, and reliability practices
• Prior experience at an early or growth-stage startup (Series A–C) where you've built engineering practices, not just executed them
• Hands-on with agentic AI frameworks — LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AWS Bedrock Agents, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, or similar
• Background in offensive security, penetration testing, or red teaming
• Prior experience with self-hosted enterprise deployments at major accounts

Why Operant AI

• 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
• 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
• Early in APAC — join a growing regional team with outsized influence on how Operant operates engineering across timezones as we scale
• Lean team, outsized impact — tight, high-caliber team where your contributions are visible and your growth is real
• Real engineering, not field engineering — you ship to the shared product codebase, not to a customer-specific fork
• Competitive senior compensation — base salary, performance bonus, equity, and benefits benchmarked to Bangalore's senior technology market

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.