Senior Software Engineer

About Orchid

Orchid is a fast-growing startup in the identity infrastructure space, backed by leading investors Team8 and Intel Capital, and with customers from Fortune 500

companies such as Costco and Repsol. Our mission is to redefine how organizations understand and manage identity by addressing real, everyday challenges faced by identity and security teams.

We take a bottom-up approach to identity transformation, starting with deep visibility into how identity actually works across an organization:

• Visualize the pain- Scan applications, analyze their behavior, and surface clear insights into identity management gaps and risks.
• Remediate with confidence — Connect fragmented homegrown and SaaS applications to existing identity infrastructure, turning insights into actionable improvements.

To support this mission, Orchid has raised a $36M seed round and is building a platform that leverages deep tech and LLMs, and helps companies regain control over identity at scale.

The Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will play a key role in engineering mission critical agents that operate deep inside customer systems, with a systems-level mindset and a high engineering bar for performance, stability, and safety. This is a unique opportunity to build agents that work ‘close to the metal’ in customer environments, where correctness, safety, and performance directly impact customer operations.

This is a hands-on role that combines strong engineering with a research/security mindset because the work often requires reverse-engineering real-world behavior: understanding how operating systems and running applications actually behave, validating assumptions through experimentation, and translating fragmented documentation into robust, production-ready integrations.

What You’ll Do:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to gather and understand system requirements and constraints.
• Write production-grade code (tests, debugging, profiling) with a high bar for stability, performance, and safety.
• Work in an Agile environment: estimate, plan, and commit to sprint goals; deliver iteratively while maintaining a high engineering bar.
• Develop and maintain high-quality technical documentation and operational runbooks for implemented solutions.
• Validate assumptions through structured testing: reproduce issues reliably, run
• controlled experiments, and translate findings into robust, testable implementations.
• Partner closely with our Support team by providing the right signals and tooling to triage and manage incidents effectively.

Requirements

Requirements:

• At least 3 years of hands-on experience in low-level systems development.
• Strong understanding of user-space operating system concepts, including processes and memory management.
• High proficiency in low-level programming and object-oriented design, especially with modern C++.
• Solid grasp of software engineering fundamentals such as data structures, algorithms, and design patterns.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and debug complex issues in production systems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with great attention to detail.
• Ability to work independently as well as collaborate effectively within a team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated experience delivering high-quality software under strict deadlines.

Bonus Points

• Golang proficiency.
• Extensive experience developing agent-like software that runs inside customer systems (on-premise or cloud) and operating in complex production environments.
• Experience with modern language instrumentation frameworks (e.g., Java, C#,Python, Node.js).
• Proficiency in Linux internals or K8s internals.

Why Join Us

• Make real impact from day one: shape core engineering decisions,architecture, and the technical roadmap for critical customer deployments.
• Work on hard, high-leverage problems in real customer environments—where reliability and operational excellence matter.
• Fast, high-quality team with a strong engineering bar and high ownership.
• Work across a broad and evolving technology surface: operating systems,runtime internals, networking/protocols, and modern application stacks—constantly learning and applying the right tool for the problem.
• Growth through high-impact technical ownership: lead cross-team projects end-to-end, own architectural design for major initiatives, and driveengineering standards across the organization.