Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Sondera
Principal Site Reliability 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 production platform: how our services run, ship and recover, and what they cost. Security engineers and CISOs depend on it because their AI agents can't act until Sondera returns a verdict. You decide how a change reaches production and rolls back, what we measure and page on, how we recover from losing a zone or a region, and what an agent may do on its own during an incident. You'll turn our AI security research into enforceable, systems-level controls.
Principal is a senior individual-contributor role; you lead through design and review.
Make release and rollback something any engineer on the team can run, for every service.
Set SLOs for the services that render verdicts, with alerts that page before a customer notices.
Prove recovery from a lost zone or region with timed drills.
Build agents that triage incidents from logs, traces and metrics, citing their evidence, and propose fixes a person approves.
Give every running component an owner, a cost estimate and a budget.
Keep Sondera deployable in customers' own infrastructure from signed, scanned artifacts.
Have run production systems customers depend on, through on-call, and still write code.
Run containers on Google Cloud, on Cloud Run or Kubernetes, and operate managed Postgres, networking and IAM.
Write infrastructure as code, and review it as closely as application code.
Design SLOs and burn-rate alerts from what users experience, and write incident reviews people act on.
Have led a migration or cutover with a rollback you tested before you needed it.
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. Judging when an automated diagnosis can be trusted matters more.
Experience debugging Rust or gRPC services in production.
OpenTelemetry tracing and metrics across services.
Multi-region Postgres failover and point-in-time recovery.
Agents or automation for incident triage, with an evaluation of their diagnoses.
Software that enterprises run in their own infrastructure, shipped as signed Helm charts.
A public record of your work: papers, talks, open source or technical writing.
Rust for the services that render verdicts, Python for AI, and TypeScript for the web applications. Policy compiles to a formal policy language. The platform is defined as code and continuously delivered, and runs in Google Cloud and in customers' own Kubernetes clusters.
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 $220,000–$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 → operations 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