R-07 · RACD
RESEARCHFounding Security and Reliability Engineer, RACD
We are about to hold other organisations' telemetry, which is a map of everything they are bad at. That deserves a named owner.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£220,000 to £370,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.45% to 0.95% of RACD
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
RACD ingests the most sensitive operational data an organisation has: what is breaking, how often, and where nobody has looked in years. The security posture around that and the reliability of the system reading it are the same problem seen from two angles, and neither should be a rota that everyone contributes to and nobody owns.
You would own the threat model, the boundaries between tenants, incident response for our own systems, and the on-call design for a product whose entire pitch is that its alarms can be trusted. An observability company with poor observability is a short story with an obvious ending.
More on the company itself: RACD →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first fortnight produces one document: the threat model, written for a multi-tenant telemetry store, with the parts we are currently getting wrong named explicitly. Nobody will be defensive about it. That document then sets your own priorities rather than being filed somewhere.
A normal Tuesday: tenant isolation work, a review of somebody's change that touches a boundary, and the slower project of designing an on-call rota this team will still tolerate in two years. Roughly a day a week goes on enterprise assurance evidence, because it has to exist and doing it properly once is cheaper than doing it badly every quarter.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Kubernetes, cloud and bare metal both, identity and secrets management, and a detection stack you will largely choose yourself. Infrastructure as code. Plus whatever the ingest path is written in, because reviewing it is part of the job.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The threat model
Written down, revisited, and specific to a multi-tenant telemetry store.
02
Tenant boundaries
Isolation that holds under a real attempt, not a diagram claiming it does.
03
Our own on-call
Designed so the people carrying it stay, which is the only reliability metric that compounds.
04
Assurance
The evidence an enterprise buyer needs, produced once and then kept true.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have owned security or reliability for a system holding other people's data
- ▸Practical depth in one of: applied cryptography, multi-tenant isolation, detection engineering, distributed systems failure
- ▸You have run or designed on-call, and have views about what made it survivable
- ▸You can describe an incident you handled badly and what changed afterwards
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸You have taken an organisation through SOC 2, ISO 27001 or an equivalent, and would rather it were not the whole personality of the role
- ▸Threat modelling for multi-tenant data platforms specifically
- ▸Offensive experience, or a standing habit of trying to break your own boundaries
- ▸You have said no to a shipping date, been right, and kept the relationship afterwards
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£220,000 to £370,000 base, plus 0.45% to 0.95% of RACD, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.