Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

About Penbrothers

Penbrothers is an HR & remote talent management partner and one of the fastest-growing companies in the Philippines. We provide talented Filipinos with global opportunities in high-growth startups and dynamic companies, from the comfort of their own homes.

About the Client

Our client is a Lloyd's of London–accredited insurance coverholder and Asia's leading local cyber incident response firm, delivering end-to-end digital emergency support across the region. They are pioneering the A2I (Assurance-to-Insurance) model in cybersecurity — uniting preparation, response, and insurance into a seamless pathway that minimizes financial and operational impact from cyber attack.

Through expert consulting services, response assurance subscriptions, and innovative cyber insurance, they help organizations get ready, respond, and recover from cyber attacks — all delivered by local specialists working in concert.

Their mission is clear: to bring complete cyber peace of mind to every organization in Asia, from the first moment of breach through full recovery and beyond.

About the Role

You will build the core technology that powers our client's cyber incident response capability across Asia. This is fundamentally a systems and backend engineering mission—designing robust, scalable components, services, and indexing systems to transform raw forensic and log data into structured, queryable evidence under extreme time pressure. You will also build the surrounding platform, including the AWS infrastructure and the core web application that orchestrates our end-to-end response. Your work will directly and materially shorten the time between a customer activating IR-1 and our responders having a fully-populated, searchable investigation environment. You will be building a platform that brings clarity and operational control to chaos, directly supporting our mission of cyber peace of mind.

What You'll Do

• Platform Backend Engineering — Developing and owning backend services and APIs for the IR-1 platform, built on TypeScript/Next.js. This includes core business logic, integration with downstream response infrastructure, callback handling, async job orchestration, and admin UI surfaces.
• Event Processing Systems — Designing and operating high-throughput systems for ingesting, classifying, and processing forensic and log data, including parsing, transformation, and event routing.
• Go-based Service Development — Writing and maintaining performance-critical backend services in Go, including parsers for binary/semi-structured data and log normalisation tools.
• Search and Data Indexing — Implementing robust bulk-indexing strategies into OpenSearch, focusing on schema design, query optimization, retention, and data quality.
• System Reliability and Observability — Ensuring high throughput, reliability, and operability of all systems, including designing for retry semantics, dead-lettering, and graceful handling of malformed inputs.
• AWS infrastructure — Maintaining and extending AWS response stack: ECS Fargate task definitions, S3 with versioned storage, IAM, OpenSearch sizing, EC2 file servers, all managed through Terraform / OpenTofu Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Forensic collection tooling — automated generation of host data collection configurations tailored to per-case scope (Velociraptor offline collectors are the current example; you do not need prior Velociraptor experience).
• Working directly with responders — Sitting close enough to the people using what you build to understand their workflows, remove manual steps, and iterate on what they actually need.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (or 3–5 years if strong across the stack and clearly motivated by the work).
• Strong Backend Systems Instincts: comfort with structured and semi-structured event data, schema design, bulk ingestion patterns, and reasoning about throughput, reliability, and security under load.
• Production experience with AWS — ECS, S3, IAM, RDS, Secrets Manager.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform or OpenTofu.
• Strong Golang for backend services — or equivalent depth in another systems-level language.
• Strong TypeScript with production experience in Node.js, Next.js, or a comparable server-side TypeScript framework.
• Strong written and verbal English.

Preferred Qualifications – What Sets You Apart

• Deep production experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and async job systems (BullMQ, Sidekiq, Celery, SQS, or similar) used within a modern web application stack.
• Hands-on experience building or operating robust, high-volume backend services, event-driven architectures, or complex systems integration.
• Familiarity with systems for structured/semi-structured event processing or search/analytics backends like OpenSearch / Elasticsearch / Splunk / Datadog.
• Familiarity with general systems tooling like Kafka, Kinesis, Vector, or similar high-throughput queueing or stream processing systems.
• Scripting experience (e.g., Python, Bash) for ad-hoc automation, tooling, or AWS glue code.
• Domain exposure to security work — DFIR, SOC tooling, SIEM/SOAR, EDR/XDR, MDR, threat detection, or similar. We can teach you the domain if you bring the engineering.
• Familiarity with Velociraptor, Timesketch, or other open-source DFIR tooling.
• Experience handling offline forensic collections (memory captures, disk images, triage packages).
• Prior time at an MSSP, MDR provider, IR consultancy, EDR/XDR vendor, or DFIR product team.

Our Hiring Process

We utilize AI tools to enhance hiring efficiency and ensure a fair evaluation. Consequently, candidates will engage with an AI Interviewer, supervised by Human Talent Acquisition Experts who will support your entire application journey.

Our AI Expectations: While we encourage you to use AI for CV refinement and research, we require that all interviews and assessments be completed through your own authentic effort. The use of real-time AI assistance during interviews or to complete skills tests is strictly prohibited to ensure a fair and genuine evaluation of your capabilities.

What You'll Get

At Penbrothers, we are obsessed with creating positive employee experiences. Here you'll find an environment that nurtures learning and provides opportunities for growth. You'll have the opportunity to make an impact on fast-growing startups and dynamic companies.

· Meaningful work & Growth: We take every opportunity to stretch ourselves and deliver an excellent client experience.

· Employee as our biggest asset: We are genuinely invested in our people's career and welfare.

· Global reach & local impact: Get to work with high-growth startups and dynamic companies from the comfort of your own home.

· Powering global startups: We've created 1,400 Filipino jobs that empower global start-ups to focus on growth.