---
title: 'Backend Engineer at DepthFirst'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-hkjvamy7k1z9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Backend Engineer at DepthFirst

- **Company:** DepthFirst
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-09-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst/a2416174-4eee-416f-bf5e-e3b7d9c0b4d5

## Job description

## About depthfirst

We believe that software is the foundation of modern civilization - yet vulnerabilities threaten its integrity, security, and resilience. We are on a mission to solve security. depthfirst is building intelligence to detect and remediate critical software vulnerabilities. We are training and scaling security AI agents to discover zero-days vulnerabilities across large customer codebases and popular open source software. Our founding team includes deep expertise in data, infrastructure, security and LLMs with technical leaders from DeepMind, Databricks, Square, and Faire. We are looking for strong technical people who are interested in working at the intersection of AI, Security, and Infrastructure.

About this role: We’re seeking an experienced Backend Engineer to lead the charge in building the world’s first AI-native platform that autonomously finds and fixes software vulnerabilities in code. You will work on infrastructure that powers our security AI agents. You’ll play a central role in designing a scalable infrastructure, solving challenges from code execution at scale, complex agent orchestration, evaluation benchmark and training pipelines. We care about engineering excellence and secure & well-architected designs that scale to thousands of enterprise-level users. Your work will play a crucial role in building a product that aims to redefine how companies do security.

You’re excited about this role because you will…

- Be a Technical Leader: Provide mentorship, set technical direction, and define best practices for backend engineering at depthfirst.
- Architect and Scale complex coding agent pipelines that scan and execute very large codebases to find the most intricate vulnerability.
- Build, Maintain and Evolve evaluation benchmarks for AI agents that reflects the problems our users face
- Take Ownership of our product, contributing to its architecture, performance, and long-term success
- Work on a Product that Solves a Critical Problem - and we already have a handful of customers who have found it valuable in fixing some eye-opening vulnerabilities within the first few days of using our product.

## Qualifications

- 3+ years of full-time experience in backend software engineering
- A passion for programming and solving problems with code. Building reliable and stable products to solve real user problems
- Familiarity with multiple languages is a plus. Our stack is Typescript/Python
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience
- A love for technology, and an insatiable curiosity for new tools to tackle real problems
- Capable of solving complex problems with simple solutions. Building reliable and scalable products, making right trade-offs along the way
- A tendency to leave things in a better way than you found it

Technologies We Use:

- Typescript, Python
- Temporal, React, NextJS
- Postgres, Temporal, Redis
- LLMs everywhere
- AWS

## What We Offer

- Competitive Salary with meaningful equity
- Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance
- Office lunch and dinner (when working from our San Francisco office)

depthfirst is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

To all recruitment agencies: depthfirst does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to depthfirst employees. depthfirst is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company.

## About DepthFirst

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Autonomous security platform that uses AI to continuously find, validate, and fix exploitable vulnerabilities across code, infrastructure, dependencies, and runtime environments.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $80M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Qasim Mithani, Daniele Perito, Andrea Michi

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cybersecurity (AI-native autonomous security)
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (developers, security teams, CISOs)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Secure the world’s most important software."

## Products & Services
- **Agentic Pentesting**: Autonomous penetration testing that runs dynamic exploits against running applications to confirm real attack paths.
- **Supply Chain Security**: Traces risk through full dependency trees and surfaces only vulnerabilities with a real execution path.
- **Secrets & Sensitive Data**: Detects and validates credentials across codebase, CI/CD pipelines, and runtime environments.
- **Code Security**: Finds vulnerabilities by tracing business logic, data flows, and cross-service interactions across the codebase.
- **Dependency Firewall**: Detects and blocks malicious behavior before it spreads in the environment.
- **Fix & Verify**: Generates merge-ready pull requests for every confirmed vulnerability, then replays the attack post-fix to ensure the vulnerability is truly resolved.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $80M (Series B announced March 2026, led by Meritech Capital Partners; Series A with 12 investors)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Meritech Capital Partners (lead Series B), plus 12 Series A investors. Backed by leading investors in AI, security, and software.
- **Growth Signals**: 33 employees (366.7% YoY growth); 11 active job postings; claims 8x more true positives and 95% fewer false positives vs. leading tools; 90% of fixes accepted by developers; $5M in platform credits offered to open source maintainers via the Open Defense Initiative.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-native context-aware reasoning** – The platform understands code, business logic, and infrastructure to find complex vulnerabilities (including business logic flaws and chained exploits) that siloed tools miss.
- **Extremely low false positives and high fix acceptance** – 95% false positive reduction and 90% developer-accepted fixes create trust and productivity.
- **Founding team** – Built security at Cash App/Faire, infrastructure at AWS/Databricks, and AI research at Google DeepMind (contributions to Gemini, AlphaDev, Nature publications).
- **Continuous autonomous verification** – After each fix, the same attack is replayed in the running application; vulnerabilities are only closed when exploitation fails, not when code changes.

## Strategic Focus
- Advancing AI agents for security through reinforcement learning (training vulnerability discovery agents, e.g., dfs-mini1 model).
- Scaling enterprise adoption and expanding the Open Defense Initiative to secure widely deployed open source projects.
- Building a research-driven applied AI lab focused on software security.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Positioned as an "applied AI lab" at the frontier of security and AI research. Team members come from top companies like Databricks, Meta, Google DeepMind, Faire, and Notion.
- **Work policy**: On-site in San Francisco (multiple offices, including 250 Montgomery St and 1 Sutter St).
- **Open roles**: 11 positions across Engineering (Backend, Product, Security, Research), Sales (Account Executive, SDR, Solutions Engineer), Product Design, and Business Operations.
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly detailed but typical for well-funded Series B startups; equity, competitive compensation, and the chance to work on cutting-edge autonomous security in a rapidly growing team.

## Sources
1. [depthfirst.com](https://depthfirst.com/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/depthfirst)
3. [depthfirst.com/about](https://depthfirst.com/about)
4. [linkedin.com/company/depthfirst](https://www.linkedin.com/company/depthfirst)
5. [builtin.com/company/depthfirst](https://builtin.com/company/depthfirst)

## Other roles at DepthFirst

- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-depthfirst-san-francisco-5cyt00c1955d) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technical Account Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-account-manager-depthfirst-san-francisco-q9z1adhzcasb) — San Francisco, CA
- [Analytics & GTM Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/analytics-gtm-operations-lead-depthfirst-san-francisco-m2bpyhgeyqyh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiter-depthfirst-san-francisco-nctmw46zw084) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-lead-depthfirst-san-francisco-hyzqtxyagt3g) — San Francisco, CA
- [Chief of Staff, CEO](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-ceo-depthfirst-san-francisco-mvtyx5wjnqtx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-depthfirst-san-francisco-mhm9q7m349mm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Sales Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-depthfirst-san-francisco-2bmyvnhjc5t1) — San Francisco, CA
- [Security Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/security-product-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-73fe5368zeje) — San Francisco, CA
- [Solutions Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-depthfirst-san-francisco-67h8ve7dk5qx) — San Francisco, CA