---
title: 'Software Engineer at Empirical Security'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-empirical-security-remote-pmwmwp4vx8n4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Software Engineer at Empirical Security

- **Company:** Empirical Security
- **Location:** Remote
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/empirical-security/1d3037a7-76df-4ebf-9a06-462902a9b8d8

## Job description

Our Company Empirical Security builds cybersecurity models and software for data-driven decisions and operations. Our platforms empower our customers to make security decisions using the best available data from across the industry, paired with their own data and state of the art machine learning and AI. Our product is a Unified Posture Management Platform that provides visibility of risk across all attack surfaces.

## The Role

Software Engineers at Empirical Security craft web applications that deliver novel security data, build data pipelines that power machine learning systems and architect software at scale to transform how organizations protect themselves. Our Software Engineers are involved throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation and design to prototyping, development and production delivery. The ideal candidate will have experience building user facing web applications, designing powerful APIs and scaling systems to handle growing volumes of data. You will collaborate closely with technical and non-technical teammates to understand our customers' problems and build products that solve them. We encourage movement across teams to share context, skills, and experience, so you'll learn about many different technologies and aspects of each product. Engineers work autonomously and make decisions independently, within a community that will support and challenge you as you grow and develop, becoming a strong technical contributor and engineering leader. Your day-to-day workflow will vary, adapting to the requirements of our users and the technical challenges that arise. One day, you may find yourself collaborating with other engineers to architect a new data pipeline that enables a novel workflow, the next you could be fine-tuning performance.

Core Responsibilities

- Architecting and creating software solutions for complex high volume data environments with a strong focus on product quality and data integrity
- Maintaining high coding standards through the development of guidelines, active participation in code reviews, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing among your team
- Designing efficient data structures and algorithms to manage large-scale and high throughput data
- Supporting the management and optimization of data storage and warehousing solutions
- Building robust APIs for use by front-end developers and interfacing external systems, and collaborating with front-end developers to integrate user-facing elements with server-side logic
- Optimizing applications for speed and scalability through performance analysis
- Participating in ETL development and data integration efforts, ensuring data quality and accessibility for analytics applications

Technologies We Use

- Our modern Ruby on Rails app (Turbo Streams, Phlex, RubyLLM) allows customers to interact with their security data
- Our custom data pipelines are built with Python and ingest all manner of security data
- We use relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and analytical datastores (e.g., Iceberg, S3Tables) to power data exploration
- Our software runs atop cloud services (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and their data-related offerings

## What We Value

- A love of problem solving, a transparent and balanced work culture, and a focus on customer outcomes
- Strong focus on creating user-oriented workflows and solutions, crossing product boundaries to deliver cohesive and solid user workflows that ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience
- A deep understanding of server-side logic, efficient data handling, and distributed systems
- Ability to work collaboratively in teams of technical and non-technical individuals and understand how technical decisions impact the people who will use what you're building
- Skill and comfort working in a constantly evolving environment with dynamic objectives and iteration with users
- Experience building high-quality software in a fast-paced CI/CD development environment

## Benefits

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Paid leave for new parents and emergency back-up care for all parents
- Unlimited paid time off

Salary The salary range for this position is estimated to be $155,000 - $225,000/year. Total compensation for this position will also include generous stock options. Further note that total compensation for this position will be determined by each individual’s relevant qualifications, work experience, skills, and other factors.

A Final Word Don't check off every box in the requirements listed above? Please apply anyway! Studies have shown that marginalized communities - such as women, LGBTQ+ and people of color - are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Empirical Security is dedicated to building an inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible workplace that fosters a sense of belonging – so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to still consider submitting an application. You may be just the right candidate for this role or another one of our openings!

## About Empirical Security

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Empirical Security builds mathematical models for cybersecurity data, predicting which vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited using both global internet-wide telemetry and enterprise-specific local models.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage, $11.9M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Chicago, Illinois, USA
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Ed Bellis (CEO), Michael Roytman (Co-Founder), Jay Jacobs (Chief Data Scientist)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Cybersecurity (Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, Threat Intelligence)
- Target customers: B2B, Enterprise security teams
- Mission: "Build data-driven models to prioritize, remediate, and summarize cybersecurity findings." The future of cybersecurity is data-driven.

## Products & Services
- **Empirical Platform**: Ingests scan results, asset metadata, compensating controls, and network topology to train a local model accessible only to the customer. Provides a web interface, API, and AI agent for triage.
- **Global Models**: Predict the probability of exploitation across 17,000+ CVEs using near-real-time internet exploitation telemetry. Trained on ~2 million exploitation events.
- **Local Models**: Enterprise-specific models trained on an organization’s own environment telemetry and controls to determine which vulnerabilities pose real risk to that specific infrastructure.
- **EPSS Model**: Empirical maintains and trains the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), a free and open machine learning model used by over 120 vendors.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Total Funding**: $11.9M (Seed round, August 2025, led by Costanoa Ventures)
- **Key Metric**: 20 employees (9 product + tech); monthly headcount growth of 4.3%
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Costanoa Ventures; co-chairs the EPSS Special Interest Group at FIRST
- **Growth Signals**: Founded by the team behind Kenna Security (acquired by Cisco). The company maintains the widely adopted EPSS model. Demonstrated higher coverage and efficiency compared to traditional vulnerability management approaches.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Data moat**: Monitors exploitation activity over 17,000+ CVEs (12x DHS CISA’s KEV), with hourly telemetry and years of historical depth.
- **Unique modeling approach**: Combines a global internet-scale model with a local enterprise-specific model, enabling context-aware prioritization that generic models cannot match.
- **Team pedigree**: Founders created the Risk-Based Vulnerability Management category at Kenna Security; Jay Jacobs is lead data scientist for EPSS and co-chair of the EPSS SIG at FIRST.
- **Transparency**: Publishes data to prove model performance; EPSS is free and open.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building a "new kind of security platform" driven by modern AI and real-world telemetry.
- Expand local model capabilities to cover more use cases (threat intelligence, vulnerability management, application security, cloud security).
- Grow the team and customer base while maintaining open standards leadership.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as collaborative, hardworking, and focused on solving new problems with data science and engineering excellence.
- **Work Environment**: Headquarters in Chicago (onsite workspace). Some roles are listed as remote (USA). Likely flexible for the right candidates.
- **Team**: Small (~20 people) and growing, offering significant impact and ownership in an early-stage startup.
- **Engineering Culture**: Rigorous model validation, emphasis on statistical learning systems, and a mission to eliminate noise in security operations. The team includes data scientists, software engineers, and security veterans from Kenna/Cisco.

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

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