Backend Software Engineer Mid-level (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 recently raised an $18M Series A, accelerating our ambition to build the next generation of application security through agentic, AI-driven systems.

We operate with a US go-to-market playbook (product-led, fast iteration cycles, aggressive growth targets) combined with deep European engineering DNA. Our 18-person engineering team ships daily, 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 high-signal, real-world vulnerabilities.

The challenge is not “run a scanner once.”
It’s running millions of reliable, isolated, cost-efficient analysis tasks across widely different application behaviors while keeping results accurate and production-grade.

We are looking for a Mid-level Backend Software Engineer to join the Security Scanners team.

You will work on the core systems that execute, scale, and operate our scanning workloads in production. You’ll collaborate closely with Security Research, who design detection logic, and turn that into robust, maintainable, high-performance software.

Context

Location: Paris (75002), 2 days remote/week
Company: Escape – Leading AI Cybersecurity Startup
Cofounders: CEO (Tristan Kalos) and CTO (Antoine Carossio)
Engineering Team: 18 Engineers, 4 Technical Leads, 3 Product Owner
You will lead a tight group of strong engineers (mid/junior) and help them level up fas

What you will do

You will contribute directly to the design, implementation, and operation of the systems that power our scanning engine in production.

You will be expected to:

Build and evolve backend systems that execute and orchestrate scanning workloads at scale
Improve reliability, isolation, and reproducibility of long-running scans
Design clean, maintainable abstractions around scanner execution and resource management
Optimize performance and cost efficiency of distributed workloads
Systematically reduce flakiness in browser-based and network-heavy scans
Partner with Security Research to integrate detection logic into production-ready components
Contribute to observability, monitoring, and incident resolution in production

Key Responsibilities:

Backend Engineering: Design and implement production-grade backend services with strong attention to readability, testability, and maintainability.
Scalability & Concurrency: Build systems that handle high-throughput, queue-driven workloads with predictable performance.
Execution Platform: Contribute to scheduling, isolation, resource governance, queueing/backpressure, and workload orchestration.
Production Ownership: Participate in monitoring, debugging, performance tuning, and continuous improvement of reliability in production.
Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with Security Research and Platform teams to ensure new detection logic integrates safely and cleanly.
Browser Automation: Work with Playwright and headless Chromium to instrument browsers and improve stability and determinism of web automation tasks.

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

Backend Software Engineer Mid-level (Security Scanners) - Paris Office

About the role