- Level
- Senior
- Experience
- 7+ years
- Work style
- Remote
- Area
- Security engineering
At a glance
The role in plain English
This is a senior software engineering role focused on the Account Takeover (ATO) protection product at Abnormal Security. The position suits experienced backend engineers who enjoy technical ownership, system design, and mentoring. Day-to-day work includes designing and building scalable backend and machine learning systems, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and ensuring system reliability. The role is remote within the UK and involves both hands-on coding and leadership responsibilities.
What you'll do
- Design and build scalable backend and ML systems
- Own end-to-end delivery of complex features
- Ensure reliability and operational excellence of critical systems
- Write and review technical design documents
- Mentor peers and influence engineering practices
What they're looking for
Essential
- 7+ years as a Senior Software Engineer
- Strong backend proficiency in Python
- Experience designing and scaling production systems
- Knowledge of relational databases and modern data storage
- Familiarity with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
Nice to have
- Experience with gRPC, Kafka, Redis
- GenAI developer tool experience
Core skills
- Python
- System design
- AWS
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Relational databases
- Kafka
- gRPC
The shape of the job
Technical depth
4/5
Pace
3/5
Ownership
4/5
Teamwork
4/5
Cyberend's reading of the listing, not the employer's own scores.
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Questions to prepare for
- 01Describe a time you designed a scalable backend system for a security product.
- 02How do you ensure reliability and operational excellence in distributed systems?
- 03Explain your approach to mentoring junior engineers and influencing team practices.
- 04What strategies do you use for incident response and service health monitoring?
About Abnormal Security
Abnormal Security provides behavioural security products, including an Account Takeover protection platform. The company develops infrastructure, ML models, APIs, and tools to detect and prevent account theft.
Full job descriptionAs published by Abnormal Security
At Abnormal AI, we protect our customers against nefarious adversaries who are constantly evolving their techniques and tactics to outwit and undermine the traditional approaches to Security.
Abnormal is recognized as a top cybersecurity startup (Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms), securing a Series D funding of $250 million at a $5.1 billion valuation in August 2024.
About The Team
The team is responsible for the ownership, development, and operation of the infrastructure and ML models, customer facing APIs and internal tools that drive Abnormal's Account Takeover (ATO) protection product. This product is crucial for detecting malicious activity and safeguarding customers from account theft.
About The Role
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to take ownership of complex feature delivery and technical design for our ATO platform. This pivotal role involves evolving the platform to scale with expanding product requirements. The position requires a blend of hands-on backend systems development, production ownership, stakeholder management, and team mentorship. The core goal is to enhance system reliability, reduce latency, and significantly accelerate feature release cycles.
What You’ll Do
Technical Delivery & Excellence
- Design, build, and iterate on scalable backend and ML systems, APIs, frameworks, and internal tools
- Own end-to-end delivery of complex features that directly impact customer experience.
- Ensure stability, reliability, and operational excellence of critical systems.
- Write clean, testable, and resilient code with attention to edge cases and performance.
- Write and review technical design documents and influence adoption across the team.
- Participate in code and design reviews, and contribute to on-call rotations.
Leadership & Collaboration
- Collaborate with product managers, designers, and engineers to align on specifications and priorities.
- Break down complex projects into clear executable steps and drive them to completion.
- Actively contribute to roadmap discussions and propose long-term technical plans.
- Communicate effectively in an async-first environment, providing clarity on updates, challenges, and solutions.
- Mentor peers, share knowledge, and influence engineering practices across the team.
What We’re Looking For
- Ownership & Growth: A senior engineer mindset—able to independently lead complex projects and grow into a technical leader within the team.
- Attention to Detail : Deep focus on code quality, reliability, monitoring, and performance.
- System Thinker : Ability to anticipate long-term scaling needs and design resilient architectures.
- Strong Collaborator: Comfortable influencing cross-team goals, mentoring peers, and working in a distributed environment.
- GenAI Affinity: Proactive in leveraging modern developer productivity tools, including GenAI assistants, to accelerate delivery.
Must-Have Skills
- 7+ years of industry experience, with proven expertise as a Senior Software Engineer.
- Strong backend proficiency in Python, with experience designing and scaling production systems.
- Proven experience with large scale system design, building resilient, scalable, and fault-tolerant applications.
- Strong knowledge of relational databases and modern data storage technologies .
- Familiarity with service-to-service communication (gRPC, Kafka) and caching (Redis).
• Experience with AWS cloud services (S3, RDS) and deployment practices. Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm).
- Strong understanding of service health, monitoring, and incident response practices.
- Experience writing technical design documents and influencing adoption across teams.
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A note on AI in our process: Abnormal AI uses AI-assisted tools to help our recruiting team prepare for candidate interviews. These tools analyze resume content and role requirements to suggest interview questions and areas for the interviewer to explore.They do not make hiring decisions or screen candidates automatically. Every decision about a candidacy is made by a person. Further, if your application is successful and Abnormal AI makes a conditional offer of employment, we will carry out pre-employment checks which must be successfully completed to progress to a final offer. All processes and pre-employment checks are in line with prevailing legislation and Abnormal AI's policies relevant to our security and privacy standards.
Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please click here . If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please click here .