Principal Software Engineer | Data Science

Position Summary

ExtraHop is at the forefront of innovation in the cybersecurity space, delivering cutting-edge solutions to protect organizations against evolving threats. Our Network Detection and Response (NDR) products empower businesses to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber risks in real time.

We seek a Principal Software Engineer to join our product development organization and serve as a technical anchor on our NDR platform. In this role, you will drive the architecture and execution of complex, high-impact engineering initiatives that define the future of our products. You will operate with significant autonomy, influence engineering direction across teams, and mentor engineers at multiple levels while delivering software that addresses the most sophisticated challenges in network security.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, write, and maintain robust, high-performance software to deploy AI/ML models that analyze network traffic for anomalous or malicious behaviors.
• Design and develop autonomous AI agent architectures and multi-agent workflows. 
• Collaborate with data scientists, threat researchers, and cloud teams to build high-performance services, pipelines, and tooling that accelerate ML experimentation and production workflows. 
• Drive engineering excellence across teams through code reviews, design reviews, and the establishment of standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives and represent engineering in conversations with senior leadership and external stakeholders.
• Contribute to product strategy by bringing deep technical insight to roadmap discussions, build-vs-buy decisions, and competitive differentiation.
• Lead by example. Provide technical mentorship to software engineers on the team, fostering a culture of continuous learning, optimization, and rigorous engineering discipline. 

Required Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in Principal, Lead, or Staff capacity shipping enterprise-grade software. 
• Expert-level programming skills in Python and Go, with an emphasis on writing production-quality, well-tested, and modular code.
• Experience in machine learning, statistics, or a related quantitative discipline.
• Experience building or operating production AI/ML systems, including model lifecycle management, data/training pipelines, and monitoring.
• Expertise in applying machine learning or data science techniques to cybersecurity use cases such as anomaly detection, behavioral analysis, or threat classification.
• Advanced understanding of threat detection methodologies, intrusion prevention systems, and incident response workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• A strong fundamental understanding of network telemetry and protocols.
• Prior experience working in the cybersecurity domain. Familiarity with threat actor techniques and common network attack vectors.
• Familiarity with machine learning applications in cybersecurity.
• Understanding of threat detection, intrusion prevention, and incident response strategies.
• Deep experience with cloud services on AWS or Azure.
• Deep experience with containerization and orchestration technologies including Docker and Kubernetes at production scale.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences at the executive level.

The salary range for this role is $175,000 - $195,000 + bonus + benefits