Who are we?

Escape is one of Europe's fastest-growing cybersecurity startups, backed by Y Combinator, building AI-powered automated penetration testing that finds vulnerabilities before attackers do. We've secured dozens of prestigious enterprise customers, are growing 15%+ MoM.

We operate with a US go-to-market playbook (product-led, fast iteration cycles, aggressive growth targets) combined with deep European engineering DNA. Our 15-person engineering team ships weekly, owns what they build, and solves hard problems at the intersection of security, distributed systems, and AI.

Job description

At Escape, we build an automated security scanning platform that analyzes real customer applications at scale and surfaces high-signal, real-world vulnerabilities.

The challenge is not “run a scanner once.”
It’s running millions of reliable, isolated, cost-efficient analysis tasks across widely different application behaviors while keeping results accurate and production-grade.

We are looking for a Mid-level Backend Software Engineer to join the Security Scanners team.

You will work on the core systems that execute, scale, and operate our scanning workloads in production. You’ll collaborate closely with Security Research, who design detection logic, and turn that into robust, maintainable, high-performance software.

Context

What you will do

You will contribute directly to the design, implementation, and operation of the systems that power our scanning engine in production.

You will be expected to:

• Build and evolve backend systems that execute and orchestrate scanning workloads at scale
• Improve reliability, isolation, and reproducibility of long-running scans
• Design clean, maintainable abstractions around scanner execution and resource management
• Optimize performance and cost efficiency of distributed workloads
• Systematically reduce flakiness in browser-based and network-heavy scans
• Partner with Security Research to integrate detection logic into production-ready components
• Contribute to observability, monitoring, and incident resolution in production

Key Responsibilities:

• Backend Engineering: Design and implement production-grade backend services with strong attention to readability, testability, and maintainability.
• Scalability & Concurrency: Build systems that handle high-throughput, queue-driven workloads with predictable performance.

Tech Stack

• Languages: Python (primary), Go (performance/network-heavy components)

Perks