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Founding Engineer

SubImage

San Francisco, CAFull-time$170–230K/yrSeen 2mo agoStill listed today

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At a glance

Compensation
$170–230K/yr
Location
San Francisco, CA
Schedule
Full-time
Work Authorization
Not specified

Olive lists jobs from US employers, including remote roles you can work from the United States.

Job overview

SubImage is a seed‑stage startup building a security‑focused infrastructure mapping platform using open‑source Cartography. The Founding Engineer will tackle novel security challenges, design distributed systems, and help customers visualize and remediate vulnerabilities in real time.

Skills & qualifications

RequiredNice to have

Skills

PythonDistributed SystemsCloudKubernetesNeo4jFastAPISvelteWebGLTerraformOwnershipSystems Thinking

Qualifications

3+ Years Experience

Benefits

Medical Insurance
Vision Insurance
Dental Insurance
401(k) Match

Full job description

SubImage maps infrastructure the way an attacker does so security teams at scale-ups and enterprises can find and fix problems. We’re built on Cartography, the open source tool our founders helped create at Lyft that’s now a CNCF project, adopted at over 70 companies. We are a seed stage company (a mighty team of 4!) but are growing rapidly - our customers are companies and organizations that your parents have heard of. We need engineering help to meet the demand! This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of something big. Or at least, figure out very quickly that this won’t work (it’s startup life; just being honest about it). Novel engineering problems you’ll work on We’re seeking the holy grail in multiple security challenges.

  • Can we triage and contextualize security vulnerabilities? This problem goes deep: • Are the vulns on internet-facing assets? Via which active services? What is the full path?

  • Are the vulnerable functions truly reachable from a code perspective?

  • Are there any compensating controls at play that make the vuln invalid?

  • Once exploited, does the vuln grant access to sensitive data? Via what providers, and via how many hops?

  • Any agent can generate code now. How can we prove that the security fixes our agent proposes will not break anything?

  • How do we build a near-real time, self-updating map of our environment so that we can see and stop attacks as they happen?

  • How do we teach an agent to answer questions about our graph very quickly, while making sure that it has just the context that it needs, without making mistakes?

  • How do we correctly determine the owner of a given resource based on environment heuristics like actions, tags, logs, files?

  • How do we reliably and sustainably track and manage the state of compliance processes like vulnerability management?

  • How might we implement “time travel” in our knowledge graph so that we can replay an attack as it happened?

If these sorts of challenges sound inspiring, this is our life’s work, and this is the job for you. Who we’re looking for

  • 3+ years experience at high growth companies. We are looking for fast trajectory. You are curious and hungry.
  • Strong experience in distributed systems and cloud tech.
  • You are based in the SF Bay Area and want to work in-person, in-office 5 days a week.
  • Strong sense of ownership. You care deeply about delivering a solution end-to-end.
  • You demonstrate strong first-principles, systems thinking.
  • You aren’t afraid of implementing gnarly business logic to make the lives of jaded security engineers easier. Ideally you can do this in a maintainable and elegant way.

Nice to have

  • Knowledge of cloud-native infra e.g. Kubernetes.
  • Information security knowledge and interest.

Our stack

  • Cartography does the ingestion. You’ll be shipping code that runs at over 70 companies, not just ours.
  • Neo4j holds the graph.
  • Python backend with FastAPI.
  • Svelte frontend with a custom homegrown cool-as-hell WebGL graph renderer.
  • An MCP server that exposes the graph and everything in our platform to AI agents.
  • IaC with Terraform.

Benefits

  • Health + Vision + Dental
  • 401k match (what STARTUP does this?)

Perks

  • Gym membership
  • Lunches with team
  • Unlimited PTO

How this job compares

Set against the 3,166 open Backend Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 3, 2026.

Pay
  • This posting$170–230K/yr
  • California median$170–246K/yr817 salary ranges
  • US median$150–225K/yr2,535 salary ranges

This range's midpoint, $200K, is 4% below the California median midpoint ($208K) — in the middle half of Backend Engineer salary ranges in California.

Openings
Olive Jobs lists 1,072 open Backend Engineer jobs in California and 3,166 across the US. 13% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
Hiring the most in California
Experience
This posting asks for at least 3 years of experience; Backend Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (2,612 postings).
Education
813 of the 3,166 open Backend Engineer jobs (26%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.

Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 3, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.

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