Senior Software Engineer, AI Security

Summary/Objectives

Tanium is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to help build a new AI Security solution that enables the world's largest enterprises to secure AI agents and the endpoints they run on. In this full-stack role with a strong emphasis on backend engineering, you will design and develop high-scale, distributed systems that give customers visibility into and control over agentic AI across their environments. The ideal candidate brings a deep understanding of building reliable, performant services at scale, a strong foundation in security principles, and hands-on familiarity with the technologies that power AI agents and agent harnesses, such as LLM integrations, tool-calling frameworks, and the Model Context Protocol. This is an opportunity to shape a product at the forefront of AI security and make a significant impact at a company dedicated to transforming how organizations manage and secure their technology environments.

Essential Job Functions

• Design and develop high-scale, distributed backend systems that give customers visibility into and control over agentic AI across their environments
• Build services and integrations using LLM APIs, tool-calling frameworks, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and design retrieval (RAG) and data pipelines that support AI-driven capabilities
• Use AI coding assistants and agent tooling effectively in day-to-day development, and review, refactor, and debug AI-generated code with sound judgment
• Design and develop robust, scalable, and maintainable software features and systems across the full software development lifecycle
• Architect technical solutions that meet complex product requirements while balancing performance, reliability, and security considerations
• Collaborate with product management, UX, and peer engineers to define requirements, estimate effort, and deliver high-quality solutions on schedule
• Lead code reviews and provide constructive technical feedback to elevate engineering standards and promote best practices across the team
• Identify, troubleshoot, and resolve complex software defects and performance bottlenecks in both development and production environments
• Mentor and support the growth of junior and mid-level engineers through knowledge sharing, pairing, and technical guidance
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of engineering processes, tooling, and development practices to increase team velocity and code quality
• Partner with security and infrastructure teams to ensure software is developed and deployed in alignment with Tanium's security and compliance standards

Minimum & Preferred Job Qualifications

• Education
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience
• Experience
  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production-quality software
  • Demonstrated experience designing and implementing distributed systems or large-scale, high-availability applications
  • Experience building and shipping AI-powered products or agents at scale, including LLM integrations and tool-calling
  • Hands-on experience building a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server or integration that ran in a production environment
  • Experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and the data pipelines that support it
  • Experience building backend services and enterprise web applications that serve large user bases (for example, millions of users)
  • Experience with the full software development lifecycle, including requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, and deployment
  • Preferred: Experience working in a cybersecurity, SaaS, or enterprise software environment
  • Preferred: Foundation in security principles, such as secure design, authentication and authorization, and threat modeling
  • Preferred: Familiarity with cloud infrastructure platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud
• Other
  • Proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as Go, C++, Java, Python, or similar
  • Ability to prompt AI coding tools effectively and to read, understand, refactor, and debug the resulting code, regardless of language
  • Strong understanding of software design patterns, data structures, and algorithms
  • Experience with version control systems, particularly Git, and collaborative development workflows
  • Preferred: Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
  • Preferred: Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks

Core Competencies

Tanium Competencies:

• Demonstrates initiative and motivation
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Team player
• Person of high ethics and integrity
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, changing environment

Security & Privacy Roles & Responsibilities

All roles at Tanium have access to Tanium Confidential Information, therefore, Tanium assigns a universal Position Risk Designation to all roles to hold everyone to the highest possible standard. All roles at Tanium are subject to the following requirements:

• Protection of Tanium information and other assets
• Compliance with Tanium policies and terms of applicable agreements with Tanium

Additional privacy and security-specific duties, skills and qualifications relevant to the role, if any:

• This role involves access to internal systems, administrative credentials, and cloud infrastructure. The individual in this position is expected to handle such access responsibly and in strict accordance with Tanium's security policies, access control procedures, and data handling guidelines.

About Tanium 

On a mission. Together. 

At Tanium, we are stewards of a culture that emphasizes the importance of collaboration, respect, and diversity. In our pursuit of revolutionizing the way some of the largest enterprises and governments in the world solve their most difficult IT challenges, we are strengthened by our unique perspectives and by our collective actions.   

As a global organization with stakeholders around the world, it’s imperative that the diversity of our customers and communities is reflected internally in our team members. We strive to create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone feels they have opportunities to succeed and grow because we know that only together can we do great things.  

Our commitment to excellence and innovation has earned us a place on the Forbes Cloud 100 list for ten consecutive years, and we continue to be recognized worldwide as a great place to work. 

Each of our team members has 5 days set aside as volunteer time off (VTO) to contribute to the communities they live in and give back to the causes they care about most.   

What you’ll get

The annual base salary range for this full-time position is $191,000 to $293,000. This range is an estimate for what Tanium will pay a new hire. The actual annual base salary offered may be adjusted based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, location, education, skills, training, and experience.

In addition to an annual base salary, team members will receive equity awards and a generous benefits package consisting of medical, dental and vision plan, family planning benefits, health savings account, flexible spending account, transportation savings account, 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match, life, accident and disability coverage, business travel accident insurance, employee assistance programs, disability insurance, and other well-being benefits.