Senior Software Engineer- Backend (Product & Cloud Security)

About Yoodli

Yoodli helps people get measurably better in their careers by helping individuals land jobs, onboard at companies, learn new skills, practice speeches, sales pitches or difficult conversations, and take their Yoodli coach from one role to the next. For organizations, Yoodli upskills the entire workforce for the AI Future. Founded in 2021 by Esha and Varun as an AI communication coach, the platform has expanded to become the AI Platform for Human Skills, used for AI roleplays, practicing various conversations, and learning to use AI tools like Gemini and Claude. The team includes former employees from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tableau, and beyond, headquartered in Seattle, backed by Madrona, Neotribe, the Allen Institute for AI, Cercano, and over $60M in funding. Customers include Google, RingCentral, Databricks, Snowflake, Sandler Sales, Dale Carnegie, Toastmasters, and users in over 150 countries, with coverage in Forbes, Fortune, WSJ, Geekwire, ZDNet, and more.

About the team

You’ll operate as part of our Platform team, with a specific focus on cloud and operational security. You’ll work on problems including active monitoring and defenses, privilege escalation flows, secrets/key management, dependency and vulnerability management, BYOK capabilities, securing an AI product, and the engineering behind ensuring our enterprise customer data remain secure. This is a dedicated security role that extends into general backend and in‑product engineering. You'll ship work alongside the rest of the team, focusing on security improvements, partnering with security and compliance leadership, and spotting trust‑boundary problems in design reviews before they ship. Because we’re a startup, you’ll have real ownership and the chance to set the standard for how a company our size does security well.

What you'll work on

• Authentication, authorization, access controls
• Data isolation and data loss prevention
• Active threat monitoring and defenses
• Secrets management, key rotation, and secure‑by‑default patterns other engineers build on
• Vulnerability and dependency management
• Audit logging and the data plumbing behind customer security and privacy requirements

What we're hoping you bring

• Mission alignment: You believe in our vision and care deeply about helping people achieve more by communicating better
• Backend expertise: You have strong experience building scalable, reliable backend services that power great user experiences
• A security mindset: You think in terms of trust boundaries, blast radius, and failure modes without being asked to. You've been the person on a team who catches the thing everyone else missed
• Pragmatism: You right‑size solutions. Security that grinds the company to a halt isn't good security - you know how to pick the controls that matter and skip the theater
• Craft and quality: You hold yourself to a high bar for code quality and system design, and you make the engineers around you better

About you

• 5+ years of professional development experience, shipping production code
• Strong backend capabilities: you've owned services end‑to‑end and have a track record of delivering in fast‑moving environments
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS, or Azure) and Infrastructure as Code
• Proficiency in TypeScript, Python, or equivalent languages - with the ability to debug complex distributed systems
• Experience applying security fundamentals in a professional environment, and the judgment to apply them proportionally
• Clear communicator who works well across engineering, product, and compliance, and who gives and receives feedback well
• You understand how your work connects to business outcomes and user impact
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Ability to be on‑site in our Seattle, WA office 3 days a week (M, T, Th)

Extra credit

• Experience building in support of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or similar) as an engineer
• Multi‑tenant SaaS at enterprise scale
• NoSQL databases and Kubernetes
• Google Cloud Platform
• Responding to enterprise security questionnaires or customer security reviews

What's in it for you?

• Huge impact opportunity: Define technical strategy and build foundational systems at a fast‑growing startup. Work directly with the founding team and shape the future of the AI platform for human skills
• Competitive compensation: Significant equity opportunities at a venture‑backed company
• Base compensation: $160k - $190k
• Join a fun, inclusive and highly motivated team culture (and help define it!)