Software Engineer

About Origin by Prelude

Origin is building the next generation of endpoint security for the Semantic Era. As AI agents and LLMs fundamentally change how humans interface with computers, legacy signature-based defenses are failing. We are pioneering a new approach - moving from "known bad" detection to "contextual intent" understanding - to ensure enterprises can safely adopt the productivity of AI without the risk. Our platform monitors and protects some of the most important organizations in the world. We are backed by Sequoia Capital, Brightmind Ventures, IA Ventures and other top firms.

Role

Origin is seeking to expand our team with highly technical and passionate software engineers. The team is responsible for designing and developing our endpoint observability platform. In this role, you will work at the intersection of operating system internals, agent and service development, and endpoint security building resilient and efficient software.

As a core contributor, you will focus on systems programming, high performance endpoint agent development, and service architecture. You'll work on problems spanning real-time event processing (>15M+ events/min per endpoint), distributed systems managing 1M+ concurrent gRPC connections, integrations with hardware execution tracing, custom correlation algorithms, and high-throughput analytics infrastructure processing trillions of events. This role involves deep technical problem solving, systems programming, performance optimization under strict resource constraints, and distributed systems architecture at scale. Expertise in areas such as high performance systems design, agent performance optimization, and secure service development will be key to success. This role requires delivering scalable, high-quality software, driving innovation, and collaborating across engineering and research teams to advance our mission.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement high-performance anomaly detection algorithms using optimized data structures and our ontology

• Build and optimize distributed backend services handling 1M+ concurrent persistent gRPC streams

• Develop and optimize endpoint agents for minimal resource footprint (<5% CPU/memory overhead) while processing system telemetry in real-time

• Architect multi-tenant event processing pipelines with partition-aware queries, exactly-once semantics, and billion-scale data volumes

• Contribute to low-level systems programming: system integrations (e.g., ETW, hardware PMCs), memory management, concurrency primitives

• Drive technical decisions on distributed systems patterns, columnar database schemas, API contracts, and performance optimization strategies

• Collaborate with research team to translate research into production-grade implementations

• Obsess over customer problems, focusing on velocity and user impact over technical pedantry

Skills & Experience

• Demonstrated ability to build systems operating at significant scale (millions of concurrent operations, high-throughput event processing, distributed coordination)

• Deep understanding of distributed systems principles: streaming architectures, batching strategies, backpressure handling, recovery semantics, consistency models

• Performance engineering mindset: algorithmic complexity analysis, profiling-driven optimization, resource-constrained environments, cache efficiency

• Strong systems programming foundation: memory safety, concurrency primitives, OS internals (process/thread management, virtual memory, kernel interfaces)

• Experience with data-intensive applications: columnar storage systems, time-series databases, real-time analytics, or high-volume data pipelines

• Modern systems programming language experience (Rust strongly preferred, but we value problem-solving ability over specific language expertise)

• Cloud infrastructure experience with distributed service architectures

Nice to Haves

• Deep OS internals knowledge (Windows ETW, Apple ESF, eBPF)

• Background in high-throughput systems: high-frequency trading, observability platforms, real-time telemetry, or low-latency distributed systems

• Experience with hardware performance monitoring: CPU performance counters, LBR (Last Branch Record), profiling at microsecond granularity

• Data engineering at scale with columnar databases or similar OLAP/time-series systems

• Performance-critical open source contributions or research publications in systems, security, or databases

• Prior experience in startup environments

• Cross-platform systems expertise (Windows and macOS)

Working at Origin

Origin is a fully remote team across the US & Canada, built on trust, autonomy, and excellence. We empower our team to take ownership, move with purpose, and continuously improve. Our culture values top performers who align with our mission and embrace high standards. We offer generous healthcare, flexible PTO, and home-office support, ensuring our team has the freedom and resources to thrive. While we move fast, we prioritize quality, collaboration, and remain committed to building impactful security solutions with precision.