Staff Software Development Engineer - Windows Endpoint
Designs and owns Windows kernel-mode security enforcement drivers for an identity security platform, blocking malicious actions in real time while ensuring stability across Windows versions.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Remote Canada | Remote United States
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- You share successes and failures openly, and you work well with people. You adapt when the situation and the requirements shift. You fix issues before anyone assigns them to you, and you stay persiste
- You hold a high bar and push your teams to ship reliable systems, especially where a kernel bug carries outsized risk. You know systems software best practices, from rigorous testing to sharp peer rev
- You reach for AI tools to move faster and think more clearly, and you keep the judgment to slow down and verify by hand when the code demands it. You weigh speed against risk and decide from data.
- You feel the weight of enforcement code. You'd rather ship a correct block a day late than a wrong one now, and you choose your failure modes - fail-open or fail-closed - on purpose instead of by acci
Full description
Diversity. Inclusion. They’re more than just words for us. They are the guiding values of how we build our teams, cultivate leaders, and create a culture where people feel connected.
We take care of our employees so they can take care of our customers. Customers who come from all walks of life just like us. We hire incredible people from diverse backgrounds because when we are different together, we are stronger together.
The Role
As Staff Software Development Engineer, you'll be the Windows kernel authority for the runtime enforcement layer of our Identity Security Platform. These components decide, in-kernel, whether to permit or deny each action an identity or AI agent attempts on a Windows endpoint.
You'll set the technical direction for kernel-mode enforcement on Windows and own it end to end. That means hooks that make the right call in real time, across the fleet, without breaking legitimate workloads. Peer engineers own the macOS and Linux enforcement surfaces. You share one policy language, one event schema, and one userspace agent with them, but Windows kernel-space is yours.
You know this layer better than anyone. You want your code to be the thing that stops a compromised credential or a runaway AI coding agent before it impacts production.
What You’ll Do
- Design, build, and own our kernel-mode enforcement drivers: file-system, process and thread creation, handle operations, and registry access. You'll block operations inline in the kernel rather than logging them after the fact, and you'll build the userspace agent that installs and drives them.
- Own the kernel/user-mode enforcement boundary: kernel-side event capture, policy evaluation in user mode, and deny decisions pushed back into the driver as hash-keyed caches so subsequent hits block inline.
- Drive down enforce-mode latency on the operation hot path as we scale across large fleets. That means process enrichment, image-hash caching and eviction under heavy process-churn, and process-ancestry resolution across PPID spoofing.
- Extend enforcement into containers and isolation: Windows containers and Host Compute Service workloads, silo- and job-object-aware policy, and container identity on kernel events. Most of this is greenfield, and it sits at the center of the role.
- Harden portability and stability across Windows builds so enforcement loads and behaves correctly on the versions customers actually run. You'll deal with structure-versioning across Windows releases, PatchGuard constraints, Driver Verifier and HVCI compliance, WHQL attestation signing, and graceful degradation when a capability isn't available.
- Partner with the Linux and macOS enforcement engineers and the policy-backend team on the shared plane: policy semantics, cross-stack conformance, event schema, the common Rust agent. You'll represent Windows in cross-org architecture reviews.