Kolide’s Mission

We help organizations practice Honest Security

Building software that secures and manages digital assets

While demonstrating empathy, respect, and care for what is most important – people

Empowering them to do the best work of their lives.

Background

Kolide is a VC-backed remote-first startup building device management and security software for fast-growing companies that value Honest Security. With over 250 customers and a novel approach to solving security and compliance concerns, Kolide is poised to grow quickly over the next few years. To prepare, we are looking to responsibly develop our organization to help us meet our lofty goals while increasing our organization’s diverse set of skills and perspectives.

About The Job

Kolide’s mission can only be achieved with good ground truth, the practice of ethically collecting pertinent information, through direct observation. Ground truth is the foundational aspect of Kolide’s product.

Endpoint Engineers are directly responsible for collecting ground truth on Linux, Mac, and Windows endpoints. Today, Endpoint Engineers accomplish this by working on Kolide’s open source agent (written in Go), or directly contributing to osquery (written in Objective C and C++). This often involves researching native APIs (or reverse engineering private APIs) to allow the agent to collect the data needed to further Kolide’s detection goals.

Most importantly, your time is your own. Kolide’s engineering team has a single 1 hour meeting at the start of the week to coordinate on engineering work. The entire company has two additional meetings each week, so we get some face time and stay aware of new customers and exciting development. That’s it.

Agents are complicated, and Endpoint Engineers are also responsible for ensuring they are good citizens on the devices they inhabit and are easy for our customers to install and manage. This includes auto-updating, native installation, code signing, uninstallation, persistence, and managing its overall performance. Here are some example projects that Kolide employees completed recently and are representative of the work:

• Write tools to automate OS package generation for our agent
• Research Linux disk encryption, and create tables to expose that state to osquery
• Improve the reliability of agent’s auto update capability
• Create a multipurpose library to convert complex data to EAV structure.
• Write a type-safe layer to allow interfacing osquery to the generalized WMI query interface

While you will be working independently on projects, you won’t be on your own. As you make promising progress on a goal, other team members will be ready to assist you at your request. It’s rare in practice that a major new data collection initiative or major agent feature is driven from conception all the way to production without the assistance of others.

About You

We are looking for Endpoint Engineers with at least 5 years of general software development or SRE experience.

You will be writing code primarily in Go; basic proficiency is required. There is additional work in C++ and Ruby. This work is based in osquery: familiarity with it is a plus, but not required.

You could be a self-taught high-school graduate, or you could hold a masters in Computer Science and Engineering. It doesn’t matter, as long as you meet the criteria.

You should have some experience using or administrating macOS, windows, and Linux-based operating systems, and consider yourself a specialist in at least one of them. This could mean you have used Linux casually as your daily driver, but you have a lot of experience with the underpinnings of Windows as a developer or an administrator. We don’t expect specialist knowledge across every platform.

You should like writing, reading, and working with SQL. All of the queries we send to the endpoint are written in SQLite and understanding concepts like CTEs, casting, and aggregations, will help you decipher the more complex queries we send down to customer devices.

You are a good writer who can write prose with empathy and tolerance for less technical people. Kolide is a product that interacts directly with our customers' end-users via Slack; it helps when our engineers can contribute to the writing process.

You are naturally curious and relentless in finding the answers you seek. While this is a technical role that requires technical proficiency, we’ve found in practice that people with this personality will be driven to acquire any skills needed to get to the truth.

We are a US based remote-first company. You can work anywhere you want in the US as long as your working hours maintain a 3 hour overlap with the US eastern time-zone.

Benefits Summary

🏖️ Open, unlimited vacation policy (plus 10 paid company holidays)

🕑 Flexible working hours

💰 Fully remote culture (with $2k stipend)

🏥 Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage (100% of monthly premiums covered, plus $500 towards deductibles)

👪 12-weeks parental leave

🚴🏽‍♂️ Health and Wellness reimbursement

✈️️ Conference and Education reimbursement

🏦 401k Retirement Plan

☀️ Summer Fridays from Memorial Day to Labor Day

📱 Phone and internet stipend

🌼 Life insurance and long term disability

How To Apply

Please submit an application on this website.

Submit your resume through the link provided. Cover letters are welcome. The best applications include specific examples of things you’ve done in the past that translate well to the type of work you’ll do at Kolide.

If your application is well received, we’ll invite you to the interview stage, which will include (but is not limited to) a preliminary call, and 2-3 one-hour interviews with your future colleagues, and a final interview with the CEO. If you are applying for a technical role, we may have you complete a take home exercise. 

The entire process may take up to three weeks, depending on team availability. We appreciate you considering Kolide and are excited to read your application. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to [email protected].