Machine Learning Engineer

The Opportunity

Abnormal Security’s Account Takeover team is defining the next generation of security for Software as a Service and cloud offerings. Enterprises of all sizes have begun to adopt cloud offerings from google docs to box to slack: work that once took place in a single office building or behind a firewall is now happening out on the open internet, and criminals are very aware of the opportunities to steal data, hijack important financial information, and otherwise compromise companies that use these cloud services. Help us build a new layer of protection that will give enterprises the same level of security for their cloud offerings as Abnormal Security’s industry leading products do in the email security space. 

We’re looking to add a Founding Machine Learning Engineer to our team, who will work alongside our Director of Engineering, David Hagar, our CTO, Sanjay Jeyakumar, and collaborate with our world-class team. The individual in this role will shape and elevate our Account Takeover (ATO) team, building and owning the ML based systems that sift through millions of events to identify signs of a cyber attack. This role straddles the line between velocity and excellence. 

As a Founding Machine Learning Engineer of the ATO team, you will: 

• Build detection systems capable of highlighting rare suspicious activity (one in a million) with +95% precision &  <1minute latency on the aforementioned event stream
• Help solve a multi-layered detection problem - from modeling communication patterns to establish enterprise-wide baselines, to normalizing across multiple event sources, to making use of contextual information to avoid false positives (e.g. comparing unusual sign in locations with travel records)
• Calibrate behavior across our customers from multiple industries, with different usage patterns to provide consistent performance.
• Predict the intent and the nature of threats (e.g. is it insider threat or an account takeover), while using data from today’s attacks to help us detect and prevent the attacks of tomorrow
• Contribute in other areas of the stack: building and debugging data pipelines, or presenting results back to customers in our tools when the occasion arises. 
• Participate in building a world-class detection engine across all layers - data quality, feature engineering, model development, experimentation and operation.
• Work with infrastructure & systems engineers to design the detection engine infrastructure
• Create a magical work environment with colleagues and memorable interview process for candidates 

This is a unique opportunity in which engineers from various backgrounds could thrive. Here are just a few examples of profiles we think could be excellent: 

• An Engineer who takes a principled approach to building scalable, customer-centric solutions and, while you know and have practiced ML, it’s only one of the tools at your command
• A Machine Learning engineer who can bring “Domain Expertise” building: anomaly detection systems, email security solutions, or working on anti-abuse, Privacy, or Trust & Safety teams. 
• An aspiring technical entrepreneur who wants a rare opportunity to sit alongside our CTO to build a startup within a scale-up. 

This position is not: 

• A role focused on optimizing existing machine learning models 
• A research-oriented role that's two-steps removed from the product or customer
• A statistics/data science meets ML role

Requirements: 

• Strong Computer Science fundamentals 
• We prefer candidates who have at least 3 years of end-to-end, production Machine Learning experience (we ship our own code)

There are a lot of opportunities for growth and career advancement–it’s up to you own your career here. Some potential career paths for this role include: 

• Continuing to grow into a senior, staff, and/or tech lead individual contributor role- eventually, you could choose to specialize in just Machine Learning. 
• Moving from an individual contributor role into an Engineering Management position
• Positioning yourself to learn a ton, build an insanely great network, so you can be a Founder of your own company 

We’re a tight-knit group of diverse, boundary-breaking colleagues, where everyone feels welcome and can contribute the best work of their careers. You might be a culture-add if the following describes you:  

• You’re a fast learner who moves swiftly and autonomously, iterating on your learnings in real-time. You don’t need knowledge or experience in cyber security, but you should be excited about the mission and eager to learn about the industry quickly. You have a deeply-embedded kinetic drive that propels them to make the impossible possible.
• You are an owner who takes full responsibility for your work. You are not a problem shuffler. You understand how your work impacts the business and proactively seek information to stay informed and act as a business owner, in which there is no task beneath you. 
• You are authentic – clear about your opinions, motivations, and intent. You are curious, not judgmental, and always seek to learn more so you can improve your understanding of the world. 
• You love building technology solutions that delight customers - internal and external alike. Yes, sometimes that means you are okay working late or rising early.
• You take a principle-based approach to building products/processes. You are intentional about improving 1% better everyday. You have high standards, we do too. 

For us to realize our ambition as a company, we are going to need to do more, do better, and grow faster than any company has in our industry. This growth and our future ambition require more leadership and talent than we have today. Below are the guiding principles and the behavioral values that we look for in all company leaders:

• Velocity: to move fast, make decisions quickly to help us outpace attackers and outpace our competition (even if we make mistakes)
• Ownership: to empower ourselves to step up as leaders and take initiative with responsibility (even outside our comfort zone)
• Intellectual Honesty: to be curious and open-minded about the world, to fearlessly, and respectively share our beliefs (even if awkward)
• Customer Obsession: to always work backward from customer priorities to help focus our work (even if we feel like we know better)
• Excellence: to constantly push and challenge ourselves to achieve our ambition of being the best (even if it feels overwhelming at times)

Tech Stack:

• Languages: Python (and Go)
• Platform: AWS (Azure in the future) through Terraform, Docker, ECS
• Frameworks: Django, Celery
• Storage: MySQL, Postgres, Redis
• Frontend: Typescript, React
• ML & Big Data technologies: Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Flink, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc

We offer you: 

• The opportunity to be part of a truly special team (we have 4.9 stars on both Glassdoor and Gartner Reviews). Our veteran team has built some of the most enduring machine learning platforms at leading companies including Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, Microsoft, and Expanse. Our customer base includes multiple Fortune 500 companies. 
• A remote-first work policy. We are remote-first, but have optional working spaces in San Francisco, NYC, Utah, Seattle, Singapore, and UK/I. Safety permitting, host in-person meet-ups and company-wide offsites. 
• A competitive compensation package: We grant each employee a base salary, performance bonus, and equity. We don’t want to lose great people to compensation, so while we have provided ranges below, we believe that compensation should be a conversation not a negotiation. 
• Employee Benefits: By this point, we hope you can see that we care about our employees. Benefits vary slightly by location because of, well, laws, but feel free to share what’s important to you and we will happily tell you how we can support you in your personal and professional journey! Yes, we have health care, work-from-home-stipends, unlimited time off, health and wellness stipends, learning stipends, team-bonding budgets etc etc :)

More About Abnormal Security:

Our veteran team has built some of the most enduring machine learning platforms at leading companies including Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, Microsoft, and Expanse. We are remote-first but have offices/WeWork space located in San Francisco,CA, New York, NY, Seattle, WA, Lehi, UT, and soon London, UK. 

Our company is growing - we’ve been named One of America’s Best Startup Employers, selected as a Gartner 2020 Cool Vendor, and our customer base includes multiple Fortune 500 companies.

Interview Process: 

Our interview process starts with a casual call with one of our recruiters who wants to make sure there is alignment, so don’t worry about trying to be perfect before you apply! 

Abnormal Security is committed to creating a diverse work environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status