Principal Frontend Engineer
Sondera
Principal Frontend Engineer
Sondera
AI agent security and governance platform
AI agents act on what people write, not on everything they mean. Each step can be allowed while the sequence does harm. Sondera's policy engine decides each action from everything the agent has done in the session, using natural-language rules we turn into formal policy. The same action, in the same state, under the same policy, gets the same decision, whichever vendor built the agent. The open problem underneath is semantic integrity: every action carries out what an authorized person meant. We've published our work on it at an ICML workshop and presented it at Black Hat Arsenal, BSides and [un]prompted. Our open-source hooks and policy engine already govern coding agents, and enterprise customers run our platform. Our team has built products at Cylance, Databricks, HiddenLayer, NetRise and Obsidian Security, and we're backed by Decibel, Runtime Ventures and Aviso Ventures.
You own Sondera's web console and its design system. Security engineers, CISOs, analysts and compliance teams use it, in chat and in views, to see, govern and prove what their agents do. You decide how a new organization reaches its first governed agent, how an agent's trajectory and the verdicts on it are explained, and what a reviewer sees before approving a change. You'll turn our AI security research into systems-level controls a security engineer can check.
Principal is a senior individual-contributor role; you lead through design and review.
Take a new organization to its first governed agent, starting in chat or the web console.
Hold every merge to journey and accessibility tests.
Make the design system the contract every view is built from.
Show what a consequential change will do before anyone approves it: for a policy, what it will allow and deny, with counterexamples and replay against recorded trajectories.
Decide with users when a conversation serves them and when they need views they can search and filter.
Keep the web console fast on large fleets of agents and long trajectories.
Have shipped an accessible, data-dense web product that stays fast on large datasets, owning its architecture as well as its screens.
Write production TypeScript and Svelte 5, or React with a fast path to Svelte 5.
Turn "this is hard to read" into a change you can measure.
Keep recorded events apart from model-generated labels, and link each to its evidence.
Use coding agents daily, and review what they write as closely as you'd review a colleague's work.
Prior security experience is useful but not required. Caring that a person can verify what the system did matters more.
Chat interfaces that render structured results, or generative UI built from a design system.
Trace, timeline or event-sequence visualizations over large logs.
Research or product work on scalable oversight of AI agents.
Agent evaluation or log-analysis tools.
A public record of your work: papers, talks, open source or technical writing.
Rust for the API behind the console, TypeScript and Svelte for the web console, and Python for AI. Agents reach the same API over MCP. Policy compiles to a formal policy language. The platform runs in Google Cloud, and on Kubernetes in customers' own infrastructure.
The people who write our papers ship the product, so what breaks in production sets our next question. We study four open problems: turning written rules into policy, enforcing that policy at runtime, making agent behavior inspectable, and overseeing fleets of agents without a person reviewing every action. We build Sondera with coding agents it governs, and a person who owns the code approves every change they make to production. Whoever builds something runs it. We work remotely and in writing, and we flag decisions we can't undo before we make them.
Location: Remote, United States. We meet in person three times a year.
Compensation: Base salary of $190,000–$260,000 USD, plus equity.
Benefits: Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your dependents; a 401(k) plan; unlimited paid time off, and we expect you to take about a week each quarter, plus paid holidays.
Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas, including transfers, though not for every role or candidate.
Interview process: screen → work-sample interview and review → frontend interview → career deep dive (a structured walk through your past roles) → references. We aim to make a decision within two weeks of your screen.
Using AI in your application and interviews: Use AI to prepare, and to polish an application you wrote yourself. In the work sample you'll build without AI, then extend your work with a coding agent, so we see both how you design on your own and how you check an agent's output. The other interviews are without AI.
We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification.
Sondera provides security and governance for autonomous AI agents used in business. Its main tool, Sondera Harness, wraps around an organization’s existing agent code and monitors actions at six points in the execution loop, enforcing safety rules written in Cedar from a central place. The platform can be used as a cloud service, a self-hosted system for managing many agents with audit logs, or as a local evaluation option for experiments. Its goal is to help organizations adopt AI agents responsibly by improving reliability, security, and compliance across all autonomous AI applications.
Explore more opportunities at Sondera