Principal Software Engineer - Data Science

About the role

ExtraHop, a provider of Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions, is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join its product development organization and act as a technical anchor on its NDR platform. The role drives the architecture and execution of complex, high-impact engineering initiatives with significant autonomy, influences engineering direction across teams and mentors engineers at multiple levels.

Key responsibilities

• Design, write and maintain robust, high-performance software to deploy AI/ML models that analyze network traffic for anomalous or malicious behavior.
• Design and develop autonomous AI agent architectures and multi-agent workflows.
• Work with data scientists, threat researchers and cloud teams to build high-performance services, pipelines and tooling that accelerate ML experimentation and production workflows.
• Drive engineering excellence through code reviews, design reviews and the establishment of standards, patterns and best practices.
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives and represent engineering with senior leadership and external stakeholders.
• Contribute to product strategy through technical insight on roadmaps, build-vs-buy decisions and competitive differentiation.
• Mentor software engineers and foster a culture of continuous learning and rigorous engineering discipline.

Required profile

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years in Principal, Lead or Staff capacity shipping enterprise-grade software.
• Experience building or operating production AI/ML systems, including model lifecycle management, data/training pipelines and monitoring.
• Experience applying machine learning or data science techniques to cybersecurity use cases such as anomaly detection, behavioral analysis or threat classification.
• Advanced understanding of threat detection methodologies, intrusion prevention systems and incident response workflows.

Required skills

• Expert-level Python and Go, with production-quality, well-tested, modular code.
• Machine learning and statistics.
• Preferred: network telemetry and protocols, cybersecurity domain experience, AWS or Azure, Docker and Kubernetes at production scale.

What we offer

• Salary of $175,000 - $198,000 per year, plus a discretionary annual bonus and stock option grants.
• Medical, dental and vision coverage effective day 1, 401(k) with employer match, flexible PTO, parental leave and educational reimbursement.
• Hybrid and remote work model.