<aside> 👋🏽 As a candidate, it can be surprisingly difficult to learn what the job you’re applying for actually entails! I hope the detail we’ve put into this job posting helps you get some clarity about our company, product, team, and the role. – Sumeet Jain, Head of Engineering

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Overview

We’re looking for a backend engineering leader to manage an established team of Senior+ engineers. You’d manage engineers like Madi, Cameron, and Hugh.
You would own a large roadmap of product and engineering projects, comprising the detection platform, our self-hosting infrastructure, and data pipelines which support our ML models and business intelligence.
Given our early stage, you would be a key contributor during the company’s weekly strategic planning meetings and also be relied on to help our company evolve its culture as we navigate growth.

What We Do

Our core product protects the employees of an organization from phishing. The platform analyzes emails sent to the organization’s employees and remediates malicious messages with incredible accuracy and speed.

Here’s a glance at two pages in the dashboard:

Behind this dashboard is our detection platform, our first-party DSL for writing detection rules (MQL — “Message Query Language”), ML classification models, external services and functions like WHOIS lookup and headless browsing, and more. The entire detection platform is backed by a git-based system for version control that makes it easy to reason about individual detection techniques, collaborate with others, and manage which detection policies are active in a customer’s environment.

Why is this important?

Phishing is a means by which an attacker gains access to something they shouldn’t be able to. Think about what inappropriate access could mean to your past employers, your state government, or to non-profit organizations you care about. The impact from real phishing attacks includes:

The Role

You would manage a backend team of six Senior+ engineers. This team’s engineers are experts in various parts of our backend systems, infrastructure, and proprietary technologies (like, MQL — our DSL for writing detection-as-code policies), while also being customer-focused product engineers who care deeply about the experience their work enables.

Domain ownership is something we expect will evolve over time, given our company’s early stage. That said, for now your areas of ownership would include:

Detection Platform — Our phishing detection engine is highly accurate out-of-the-box while also being uniquely transparent in how it works and why it flags messages. Keeping it this way takes expertise and care. This domain includes the entire detection engine, its supporting services, and the message processing pipeline.
Self-Hosting Infrastructure — Our customers can deploy the entire Sublime platform on their own AWS or Azure infra, so our deployment templates and infrastructure are vital products which contribute directly to revenue and customer adoption.
Data Pipelines — This domain includes our ML model training data pipeline, which is a critical support piece of our detection platform. Our ML team, led by Bobby Filar, is the chief stakeholder for this work. This domain also includes the data pipeline that feeds our business intelligence datastore, which is relied on by various stakeholders across the company as well as the founders, to guide business decisions.

<aside> 👋🏽 If this isn’t up your alley, there’s also a Product-Focused EM role position open.

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What we’re looking for:

In general, EMs need to have a pretty diverse skillset. This role will require some proficiency across the board, but the top 2 skill areas we’re looking for are:

Experience building and operating reliable distributed systems: Email security is critical infrastructure for our customers, and we maintain a high bar for reliability and performance. You’ll be relied on to understand this problem space and engage with your highly experienced team to organize solutions.
Shipping Mindset: We run on a weekly planning cadence, which means large projects must be broken down into small iterations; and medium projects are aggressively examined to try to reduce into a smaller one-week scope. You’ll be relied on to facilitate these scoping and sequencing exercises, and also to coach your team on how to conduct this practice more independently.