[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Rapid7

Role Description

Rapid7 is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, AI-SOC to serve as a technical anchor on the team building the autonomous investigation platform at the core of our MDR service. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an engineer who brings deep expertise in data systems, distributed architecture, and ML/AI and who wants to apply that expertise to a domain where the stakes are real.

As a Principal Software Engineer, AI-SOC, your primary responsibility will be to drive the technical design and delivery of the foundational systems that make autonomous investigation possible at scale. Specifically, your focus will be to:

• Architect and implement core platform components across the AI-SOC stack, including data ingestion pipelines, query engines, investigation orchestration, and ML model integration layers.
• Own technical direction for the team's most complex and ambiguous problems, defining interfaces, data contracts, and system boundaries that scale reliably across diverse alert types and log sources.
• Partner with ML/AI engineers to design the infrastructure that trains, serves, and evaluates disposition models, ensuring tight feedback loops between production signals and model improvement.
• Establish and champion engineering standards across the team: system design patterns, data modeling conventions, testing practices, and observability requirements.
• Lead design reviews and provide deep technical mentorship to senior and staff engineers, raising the overall technical ceiling of the team.
• Identify and resolve systemic performance, reliability, and scalability bottlenecks across the distributed investigation pipeline.
• Collaborate with Product Management to shape requirements, surface technical constraints early, and propose solutions that balance speed with long-term platform health.
• Contribute to cross-team architectural decisions and represent AI-SOC engineering in broader platform and infrastructure forums.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of leading complex, high-scale system design across distributed environments.
• Deep expertise in data systems, including stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink), distributed query engines, data modeling, and storage systems (e.g., DynamoDB, S3, data mesh patterns).
• Strong working knowledge of ML/AI system design, including model serving infrastructure, feature pipelines, embedding systems, or LLM integration.
• Proven experience designing systems where correctness, latency, and throughput all matter.
• Experience working in cloud-native environments (AWS preferred), with strong command of infrastructure patterns relevant to AI/ML workloads.
• Familiarity with security operations, detection engineering, or threat intelligence pipelines is a plus.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to write clear design docs and align stakeholders around technical direction.

Requirements

• Excel at taking ownership of ambiguous, cross-cutting technical problems and driving them to well-reasoned, well-documented solutions.
• Build strong working relationships with product, data science, and platform engineering peers.
• Embody core values to foster a culture of excellence that drives meaningful impact and collective success.

Benefits

• Annual salary range for this role, depending on location, is: United States: $190,600.00 - 257,800.00 USD Annual.
• Salary ranges may vary based on geographical location and do not include variable/incentive compensation, equity, and benefits (where applicable/eligible).