Principal Software Engineer

As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll create, set and influence the technical direction of our software and architecture through hands-on development, you'll design and implement effective, scalable solutions across key product and service areas, influencing both strategic and day-to-day engineering decisions. By fostering relationships with cross-functional partners, you will contribute to the development of technical strategy. You'll help grow other software engineers through technical mentorship and guidance.
About the Team
Our Product and Engineering team works with our award-winning products to help us create a single experience to help customers assess risk, detect threats and automate their security programs for over 11,000 organizations. These teams use best-in-class technology, innovative research, and broad, strategic expertise to develop both new and existing products and features, in order to create value for customers across the world.
The stakes for creating a safer digital world are greater than ever. At Rapid7 we believe it's our responsibility to show up every day and give our best for our customers and the entire security community. Our global engineering teams are at the centre of this mission and are dedicated to building a complete suite of industry-leading products which provide a cohesive platform for our customers. Our range of solutions spans vulnerability management, detection, automation, cloud security, and penetration testing; in order to build these products our teams work with an array of technologies including Java, Python, AWS and Go, just to name a few.
Join our engineering team to help us build and innovate great products on our Insight platform using the latest technologies to make the world a safer digital space.
About the Role
As part of the Product Engineering team, you'll lead the design and development of core data models and services that enable risk modelling, asset relationships, and advanced querying across diverse data sources. You'll work closely with Product, UX, and other Engineering teams to translate customer needs into scalable, maintainable services and APIs. You'll also serve as a technical mentor and leader, helping to drive standards and architectural decisions.
You will play a key role in developing new capabilities and experiences in our Exposure Command platform, helping customers better understand, prioritise, and reduce risk across complex digital environments. This high-impact, cross-functional role supports our mission to deliver intelligent, data-driven exposure management at scale. Specifically, your focus will be to:

• Design and extend data models and APIs to support advanced search, filtering, and risk analysis capabilities.
• Contribute to the architecture and performance optimization of our query translation and evaluation layer.

• Model schemas from heterogeneous systems to provide unified, customer-facing schema representations.
• Participate in the planning and design of key features, collaborating with Product and UX to ensure solutions meet customer needs.
• Make high-impact technical decisions that influence system design across teams and bring others along through clear reasoning and collaboration.
• Contribute to a culture of operational excellence: performance, observability, scalability, and fault tolerance are first-class concerns.
• Provide mentorship and guidance to engineers, influencing standards and architectural direction across the organization.

The skills and qualities you'll bring include:

• 10+ years of software development experience with strong SQL expertise, including experience with multiple SQL dialects (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake) and building or extending SQL transpilation engines.
• Solid grasp of data structures and algorithms, with experience modeling complex data and optimizing query-building logic.
• Strong data modeling skills across relational and semi-structured data, including normalized and denormalized schemas.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, influence architecture, and align technical direction across teams. Experience as a technical leader among Staff and Senior Engineers, regularly unblocking teams and setting technical standards across your organization.
• Strong communicator and collaborator who can navigate complex cross-functional work.
• Passion for delighting customers and ensuring solutions put customer needs at the forefront
• Core Value Embodiment: Embody our core values to foster a culture of excellence that drives meaningful impact and collective success.

We know that the best ideas and solutions come from multi-dimensional teams. That's because these teams reflect a variety of backgrounds and professional experiences. If you are excited about this role and feel your experience can make an impact, please don't be shy - apply today.
About Rapid7
Rapid7 is creating a more secure digital future for all by helping organizations strengthen their security programs in the face of accelerating digital transformation. Our portfolio of best-in-class solutions empowers security professionals to manage risk and eliminate threats across the entire threat landscape from apps to the cloud to traditional infrastructure to the dark web. We foster open source communities and cutting-edge research-using these insights to optimize our products and arm the global security community with the latest in attacker methods. Trusted by more than 11,000 customers worldwide, our industry-leading solutions and services help businesses stay ahead of attackers, ahead of the competition, and future-ready for what's next.
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