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

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 operate with a US go-to-market playbook (product-led, fast iteration cycles, aggressive growth targets) combined with deep European engineering DNA. Our 15-person engineering team ships weekly, 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: 13 Engineers, 4 Technical Leads, 1 Product Owner
You will lead a tight group of strong engineers (mid/junior) and help them level up fas

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)

Escape

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

About the role