Software Engineer 1

About the Role

Enterprises of all sizes trust Abnormal's AI-native security products to stop cybercrime and protect critical communications, identities, and infrastructure in the cloud. Our products are data- and systems-intensive, operating at high scale across multiple clouds and regions.

As a Software Engineer I on our Message Security Products (MSP) team in Bengaluru, you will help build and run new email security products from the ground up. This is a hands-on, full-stack role with a strong backend focus. You will work alongside experienced engineers who provide direction and review, and you are expected to carry projects through to delivery. The role suits an engineer with a couple of years of experience who notices problems and builds solutions without being asked.

Our charter is expanding into new areas that build on Abnormal's core Email Security offering and serve a large customer base. This is a chance to join early and help shape what we build.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship features across the stack for our new and expanding products, from design discussion through implementation, testing, and rollout. Most of your work will be backend services and APIs, with some UI work such as customer-facing views and internal tools.
• Take over projects and drive them end to end. Clarify requirements, break work into steps, write the code, and validate changes in test and production, with guidance from experienced engineers on the team.
• Build the data and state handling behind our products, such as gathering data from our core email security platform and running scheduled and background jobs.
• Keep what you ship reliable. Fix bugs, address bottlenecks, add tests and monitoring, and help debug production issues. You will learn incident-handling practices before joining the formal on-call rotation.
• Work with partner teams and stakeholders, including Product, security, customer-facing teams, and other engineering teams, so your changes fit the systems upstream and downstream of them.
• Use AI tools throughout your development loop for code, tests, documentation, and experiments, and learn to validate AI-generated output to a high engineering standard.
• Spot problems and build small solutions. When you see a gap in our workflow, tooling, or product, you raise it and prototype a fix.
• Share what you learn through clear documentation, runbooks, code reviews, and project write-ups, and take on larger and less defined work as you grow.

What You Bring (Must-Have Skills)

• About 2 years of professional software engineering experience and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Full-stack experience with a clear backend lean. You have worked on at least one UI project and one backend project. Backend experience is essential, and the role leans toward backend work.
• Backend development in Python and/or Go, including designing and building REST APIs.
• Working knowledge of relational databases.
• Hands-on experience with a cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and with containers (Docker), plus exposure to Kubernetes.
• Solid computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, the basics of distributed systems and performance, and clean, testable code.
• Awareness of production observability and reliability, such as logging, metrics, alerting, and debugging live systems.
• Working fluency with AI development tools such as Cursor, Copilot, and Claude.
• Initiative. You have spotted a problem and built a small solution without being asked, such as an internal tool, dashboard, portal, or automation wizard. Examples from work, open source, or personal projects all count.
• Ownership. You can take over a project and drive it to completion without close supervision.
• Clear communication. You can explain technical tradeoffs in writing and in conversation, and you are comfortable working with Product, security, and customer-facing teams.
• Interest in core engineering work. You want to build backend and frontend systems. This is not an AI agent or ML role, though you will have plenty of exposure to AI-assisted development.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience with state management and workflow orchestration systems such as Airflow, Temporal, or DAG-based pipelines.
• Exposure to messaging and queueing systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or SNS.
• Familiarity with a modern frontend framework such as React.

Why You'll Love It Here

• Early-stage ownership with senior support. Our charter is growing into new areas. You will help shape what we build while it is still taking shape and grow in scope as it does, working alongside experienced engineers.
• Real scaling problems. You will work on collecting data at volume from the core email security platform, managing workflow state for enterprise customers, and keeping customer-facing features reliable.
• Impact on customers. Your work helps organizations stay protected from sophisticated email attacks.
• An AI-native R&D organization. Abnormal's AI-Initiated Development approach goes well beyond using AI to write code. You will build the habits and judgment that define how strong engineers work in the AI era, with investment in tools, workflows, and training.
• A clear growth path. You get ownership suited to your level and room to take on larger projects and grow toward SWE 2 and beyond.

A note on AI in our process: 
Abnormal AI uses AI-assisted tools to help our recruiting team prepare for candidate interviews. These tools analyze resume content and role requirements to suggest interview questions and areas for the interviewer to explore.They do not make hiring decisions or screen candidates automatically. Every decision about a candidacy is made by a person. Further, if your application is successful and Abnormal AI makes a conditional offer of employment, we will carry out pre-employment checks which must be successfully completed to progress to a final offer. All processes and pre-employment checks are in line with prevailing legislation and Abnormal AI's policies relevant to our security and privacy standards.

Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please click here. If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please click here.