Senior Backend Engineer (Runtime Team)

Skeletons, lasers, tattoo buses — the Torq brand grabs attention like nothing else in cybersecurity. And we're growing like crazy, backed by Series D funding, 200% employee growth, and 300% revenue growth. Fueling Torq's momentum is our game-changing AI SOC platform, backed by a team and culture that makes Torq one of Forbes' Best Startup Employers in America, and a Business Insider 'startup to bet your career on'. Life at Torq is all gas, no brakes. We're a team of relentless, collaborative go-getters pushing the boundaries of what's possible for security automation. Every role is an essential driver of Torq's success as the AI-native autonomous SecOps platform of choice for security teams across the Fortune 500. We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Senior Backend Engineer to join the Runtime team - one of the most critical backend teams at Torq. We are at a breakthrough stage, building our dream team with the most passionate and professional people in the industry. The Runtime team owns the execution layer of all Torq automations - the core of our product. We operate at a significant scale: hundreds of millions of steps and millions of security events every single day, in systems that simply cannot break. This creates constant challenges around scale, reliability, and forward-thinking design - always asking what could break next and how to prevent it before it happens. Beyond maintenance, there's a lot of innovation here, including supporting all of our AI-powered capabilities. What Will You Do? Take part in all development aspects - from design to production - of our high-scale automation runtime Lead the design and implementation of features and architectural changes that keep our platform reliable at massive scale Drive significant cross-team projects and influence decisions beyond your immediate team Lead production incidents and post-mortems, raising the bar for stability and operational excellence Mentor team members, take part in interviews, and help grow the team and its standards Work with modern AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code) as a core part of the workflow - focusing more on design, review, and impact, while maintaining deep understanding and high-quality standards through hands-on code review What Should You Bring to The Table? Experience building scalable backend systems in production environments Proven seniority - someone who can lead a design discussion, present a solution clearly and simply, and explain the "why" behind technical decisions Experience leading meaningful projects end-to-end Experience with production ownership: leading incidents, driving cross-team influence, and improving processes outside of pure coding Track record of mentoring, interviewing, or acting as a go-to engineer on a team Hands-on experience with Go (an advantage) Experience with Cloud infrastructure and services Exposure to CI/CD/DevOps, Kubernetes, Docker, and monitoring technologies Strong testing mindset - considering both automated testing and monitoring to improve team efficiency and reliability of production services Excellent communication skills both verbally and in writing, with a passion to mentor, lead, and guide others Extensive Can-Do attitude As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to a team defined and empowered by diversity. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status. We are waiting for you! We build AI for a living, and we encourage candidates to use it to prep, research, and sharpen their best work. But we're hiring humans, not chatbots. We want the real you. Use AI to tighten your resume, prep for interviews, research Torq, and outline ideas for written responses. Show up as yourself for live interviews, final assessments (the voice, logic, and reasoning need to be yours), and anywhere we're evaluating how you think — not how you prompt. Excited about our vision a