Principal Software Engineer (Data Normalization & Enrichment)

Do you find beauty in turning chaotic, unstructured data into a perfectly organized and enriched stream of information? Are you excited by the challenge of processing billions of events in real-time, where every millisecond counts? Do you want to build the system that transforms raw noise into the clear signals our security analysts use to stop attackers?

If so, we're looking for a Principal Engineer to lead the technical architecture of our Data Normalization and Enrichment services. This isn't just a data pipeline role; it's the critical link between the raw data we ingest from our customers and our ability to perform lightning-fast threat detection. You will be responsible for the high-throughput, low-latency systems that give our data meaning and context.

At Expel, we’re on a mission to make security easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to continuously improve. The quality and structure of the data you produce will directly impact our ability to protect our customers from threats. Your work is the foundation of our detection strategy.

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What Expel Can Do For You

• Give you ownership of a highly complex and business-critical real-time data processing engine.
• Provide an opportunity to work at the fascinating intersection of large-scale data engineering and cybersecurity.
• Let you become a leading expert in security data, driving our strategy for data modeling and the adoption of industry standards like OCSF.
• Surround you with a passionate, collaborative, and technically brilliant team that is tackling some of the hardest problems in the security industry.

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What You Can Do For Expel

• Architect and own the real-time systems that transform a firehose of raw security logs into a perfectly structured, enriched, and analysis-ready data stream.
• Become our expert on security data schemas, leading the charge on data modeling and the adoption of common information models like the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF).
• Drive the technical strategy for enriching our data, integrating threat intelligence and other contextual information to make our detection capabilities smarter.
• Collaborate closely with our detection and response engineers to understand their needs and deliver data that empowers them to find and stop threats faster.
• Lead and mentor other engineers, setting the bar for building performant, resilient, and scalable data transformation systems.

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What You Should Bring With You

• A passion for data quality and a deep appreciation for the power of a well-designed data model.
• An obsession with performance, latency, and building highly efficient, real-time systems.
• Professional experience developing in Go and/or Python.
• Expertise in real-time data processing and stream-based architectures (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Beam) and data serialization formats (e.g., Avro, Protobuf).
• Proven experience with data modeling, and an understanding of (or strong desire to learn) common information models like OCSF.
• Hands-on experience with cloud and data technologies like Google Cloud (BigQuery, Pub/Sub) or AWS equivalents.
• The ability to lead through influence, communicate complex ideas clearly, and mentor other senior engineers.
• Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.

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How We Run Teams

• We build and run teams where everyone is pulling in the same direction and is learning from each other:
• We work out of a shared backlog
• We peer-review everything
• We pair-program when it makes sense
• We do regular blame-free retros
  

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Additional Notes

The base salary range for this role is between $163,300 USD and $236,800 USD + bonus eligibility and equity.

We believe in paying transparently and equitably. Your salary will ultimately be based on factors such as your experience, skills, team equity, and market data. You’ll also be eligible for unlimited PTO (which we model and encourage), work location flexibility, up to 24 weeks of parental leave, and really excellent health benefits.

We’re only hiring those authorized to work in the United States. We do not currently sponsor immigration visas.

We're an Equal Opportunity Employer: You'll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

We’ll ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please let us know if you need accommodation of any kind.

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