Lead Software Engineer (Backend Platform & Security Scanners) - Paris Office

Who are we?

Escape is one of Europe's fastest-growing cybersecurity startups, backed by Y Combinator, building AI-powered automated penetration testing that finds vulnerabilities before attackers do. We've secured dozens of prestigious enterprise customers, are growing 15%+ MoM.

We recently raised an $18M Series A, accelerating our ambition to build the next generation of application security through agentic, AI-driven systems.

We operate with a US go-to-market playbook (product-led, fast iteration cycles, aggressive growth targets) combined with deep European engineering DNA. Our 18-person engineering team ships daily, owns what they build, and solves hard problems at the intersection of security, distributed systems, and AI.

Job description

At Escape, we build an automated security scanning platform that analyzes real customer applications at scale and surfaces real-world, high-signal vulnerabilities. The challenge is not “run a scanner once”, it’s run millions of reliable, isolated, cost-efficient analysis tasks, across wildly different app behaviors, while keeping results accurate and production-grade.

You will lead the Security Scanners team and own a critical part of the platform: the systems that execute, scale, and operate our scanning workloads in production. You’ll work closely with Security Research, who bring detection logic and algorithms, and you’ll turn that into software that is fast, safe, observable, and maintainable.

Context

• Location: Paris (75002), 2 days remote/week
• Company: Escape – Leading AI Cybersecurity Startup
• Cofounders: CEO (Tristan Kalos) and CTO (Antoine Carossio)
• Engineering Team: 18 Engineers, 4 Technical Leads, 3 Product Owner
• You will lead a tight group of strong engineers (mid/junior) and help them level up fast

What you will do

This role combines engineering management with deep technical leadership. You will be accountable for both:

• Raising the bar of the team (mentorship, standards, execution)
• Designing and scaling the core backend systems that run scanners reliably and efficiently

Key Responsibilities:

• Team leadership & mentorship: Lead and mentor a small backend team (mid/junior), raise the bar on delivery, code quality, reviews, and engineering standards while staying hands-on on the hardest parts.
• Architecture & scalability: Architect, build, and scale the scanner execution platform/scheduling, isolation, resource governance, queueing/backpressure, and performance/cost predictability for high-throughput workloads (crawling, web automation, file/repo/API analysis).
• Production ownership: Own outcomes end-to-end in production: reliability, observability, incident response/postmortems, performance tuning, and systematic reduction of flakiness in long-running scans.
• Research-to-production: Partner with Security Research to turn detection logic into robust, testable, maintainable components with clear interfaces, versioning, and safe rollout strategies.

Tech Stack

• Languages: Python (primary), Go (performance/network-heavy components)
• Runtime: containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS), long-running and resource-intensive scans
• Scaling: Kubernetes Jobs + queue-driven autoscaling
• Web automation: Playwright + headless Chromium
• Data: PostgreSQL, S3-compatible object storage, Redis (limited use)
• Messaging: Kafka
• Observability: OpenTelemetry + Grafana Cloud
• CI/CD & Infra: GitLab CI, Terraform

Perks

• 💸 Significant equity (Stock Options/BSCPE), making you a true stakeholder in our success.
• ❤️‍🩹 Top-tier health insurance with Alan
• 🍕 Meal vouchers with a Swile
• 💪 Sport subscription with EGYM Wellpass (ex Gymlib)
• 📚 A place to learn and grow: Access to books and online courses to help you excel in your role
• 💻 Top-tier equipment to do your best work
• 🎁 Free time to work on cool Open Source Projects.
• 🌎 Opportunities to present research and engineering work at international conferences like RSAC, BSides, BlackHat, DEFCON, APIDays (New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona)

Interview Process

We respect your time and will make it quick and efficient. The entire process will be completed within 1 week.

🤓 1 meeting with the HR representative - 30 minutes

💻 Technical challenge

🤔 1 technical deep dive with the Technical Lead - 1 hour

👋 1 personal experience interview the Head of Engineering - 1 hour

👀 1 leadership & strategy interview the CTO - 30 minutes

💌 Formal hiring proposal.