Software Engineer (Platform)

Outtake exists to empower and facilitate trust for a digital-first world. Today, impersonation, fraud, AI-driven scams, and identity abuse spread faster than any security team can respond to. So we built something different: an agentic AI platform that proactively detects, monitors and takes down impersonators and automates protection in hours, not weeks. Built by ex-Palantir, ex-CTO/founders, and ex-Notion engineers, Outtake is designed for clarity, autonomy, and velocity. Our goal is ambitious: become the trust layer of the modern internet. And we intend to do it with a lean, dense, exceptionally talented team. THE ROLE This is a platform engineering role. You shape how other engineers build. You will own the foundations that product engineers rely on every day. You’ll design and maintain the systems, tools, and primitives that determine how fast, safely, and confidently the team can ship. Your work directly influences developer workflows, reliability, and day-to-day engineering velocity. You optimize for leverage. You will prioritize work that multiplies impact across the engineering org. Instead of solving the same problem repeatedly, you’ll turn patterns into platforms and one-off fixes into systems. The goal is to make it easier for engineers to move quickly and do the right thing by default. You envision and build durable foundations. You will develop and evolve a point of view on how engineers should work, then translate that vision into code and systems. You’ll operate comfortably in messy, fast-moving environments and steadily turn them into something more solid without slowing the team down. This role expects you to balance long-term thinking with practical execution. THE TEAM "The team you build is the company you build." — Vinod Khosla Outtake is built by former founders and engineers from Palantir, Notion, Meta, Slack, and Datadog - people who’ve shipped real systems, made hard calls, and learned the cost of getting things wrong. We care deeply about craft, slope, and truth-seeking. Work here is collaborative and demanding: people pair on hard problems, challenge each other in review, and give direct, thoughtful feedback. Ownership is real - individuals own problems end-to-end, from framing and decisions to execution and outcomes. Mentorship is intentional, not accidental; people take your growth seriously and expect the same from you. The drive is high: people here care a lot, push hard, and move fast, not because they’re told to, but because they want to. We’re building Outtake as a long-term network of builders. The goal is simple - time spent here should compound. You should leave meaningfully better than when you arrived. YOU This role tends to excite people who like building the foundations of messy systems and get energy from enabling other engineers to do their best work. You might be a fit if: - You’ve built and owned foundational systems that other engineers depended on, and you’ve lived with the consequences of those decisions - You ramp quickly, thrive in ambiguity, and don’t need problems fully specified before you start making progress - You understand the tension between ideal solutions and velocity, and know when to pursue one over the other - You instinctively look for leverage and prefer systemic fixes over one-off solutions - You have a point of view on how engineers should work, and you’re opinionated about turning that into code, tooling, and defaults - You’ve worked closely with other engineers or teams as an enabler, not just as an implementer If you need a tightly defined scope and a fixed roadmap, this won’t be a fit. If you want to help define and build the platform’s direction you’ll feel at home. Bonus if you’ve: - Built or owned internal platforms, developer tooling, or shared infrastructure - Worked on agentic systems, LLM platforms, or large-scale data ingestion pipelines - Been the person people go to when systems get weird or unclear WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE What will engineers be