Software Engineer

Software Engineer — ChakraSec

About ChakraSec

ChakraSec is a mobile security research and development company building defences against
advanced Android malware — protecting the common public who are most vulnerable to
sophisticated digital threats, not just governments and large enterprises that can afford it.

Alongside our product, we also run a service-based cybersecurity offering, working directly
with organisations on security consulting and proactive defence.

We're 1.5 years in: roughly a year of deep R&D, followed by five months of aggressive
building, and we're on track to launch in the next two months. Next up: pivoting our
detection approach to iOS and other platforms beyond Android.

We're a small, early-stage, fully remote team. This is a chance to build core product from
the ground up, not maintain someone else's legacy codebase.

More about our product: https://detechtive.io/
More about our service side: https://chakra.group/

What you'll work on

• Co-own the full stack of our flagship Android application (currently in beta) — this isn't a maintenance role, you're building the core product
• Work across the entire stack — frontend, backend, and the DevOps that ships it — rather than staying siloed in one layer
• Architect, not just implement — you'll own major portions of the app's feature set as the person deciding how they're built, not just the person building what someone else designed
• Build using an AI-native development workflow — loop engineering and other cutting-edge AI-assisted methods are core to how we ship, not a bolt-on
• Work research findings (malware behaviour, threat patterns) into shippable product features
• Work closely with our security research team to translate technical findings into usable tools

What we're looking for

• 3+ years of solid software engineering experience — you can design a system, not just implement a spec
• Full-stack by necessity — you'll move across both the Android client and backend as the work demands, not sit in a front-end or back-end lane.
• Real grasp of architecture: you weigh tradeoffs, design for maintainability and scale, and make sound calls about structure before writing code. Concretely: you're the kind of engineer who surfaces a design gap or scope hole and forces the conversation before implementation starts, not after
• A track record of building reliable and secure solutions — you think about failure modes, edge cases, and attack surface as part of the design, not as an afterthought or someone else's job
• End-to-end product experience — you've taken things from idea through design, build, deployment, and iteration based on real usage, not just implemented a defined slice of a larger system
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — you build systems that are reliable, testable, and scalable by design, not by accident
• Rigorous testing practice — comfortable building test harnesses, writing unit/integration/regression suites, and thinking in terms of test coverage, mocking/stubbing, and CI-gated test pipelines. Comfortable holding the line on definition-of-done rather than letting "works on my machine" pass as complete
• Fluency in AI-native development practices — harness engineering, writing specs precise enough for an AI system to build against, and the judgment to QC and course-correct AI-generated output rather than accepting it blindly
• Familiarity with cloud-native deployment and DevOps — containerization (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and comfort operating in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• Experience with agile methodology — real sprint collaboration, not just attending standups: sprint planning, retros, and working iteratively with a small cross-functional team
• Comfortable working across the stack, or deep in one area with the ability to pick up others
• Ability to work independently in a remote, async-friendly environment with a small team
• We weigh "street knowledge" heavily — significant, real experience from independent projects, startups, or side projects you've built and shipped end-to-end counts for a lot here, often more than years spent owning a narrow slice of a large company's codebase
• Exposure to genuinely deep technical problems — things like automated Android malware reverse engineering, low-level systems work, or anything that forced you to work without a clear playbook. We're less interested in whether you've mastered it and more in whether you'll fearlessly attempt hard, unfamiliar problems rather than avoid them
• Bonus: any prior exposure to security tooling, mobile platforms (Android internals), or data-heavy systems — not required, but a plus given our domain

Engagement details (we're upfront about this)

• This is a contractor role, paid via Deel. ChakraSec doesn't yet have a registered legal entity in India — that's a medium-term goal — so we're not able to offer this as a full-time employment role on paper right now.
• Because of this, we cannot currently contribute to Employees' Provident Fund (PF). We want to be transparent about this upfront rather than have it come up later.
• Fully remote — we don't have a physical office in India currently.
• Compensation: competitive, benchmarked against international remote-contractor rates for your experience level — happy to discuss specifics once we're talking.