About RLCore Technologies RLCore is building the adaptive optimization layer for industrial automation.

Our reinforcement learning platform continuously optimizes industrial processes—improving efficiency, reducing energy and chemical consumption, and enabling better operational decisions in real time. The platform integrates with existing control systems, allowing industrial facilities to continuously learn and improve without replacing the infrastructure they already trust.

Our technology is deployed in the water industry, with expansion underway into food & beverage, oil & gas, mining, chemicals, pulp & paper, data centers, and semiconductor manufacturing. Learn more at www.rlcore.ai. The Opportunity We're looking for a technically fluent, hands-on Backend Engineer to own platform infrastructure and security depth at RLCore. You'll work closely with the agent team, the solutions team, and the rest of engineering to build backend services that hold up under operational stress, and security infrastructure that holds up under adversarial scrutiny.

You'll work across the I/O layer, deployment coordination, agent state management, and telemetry pipelines, while owning security-focused components like local secrets management, code signing, and identity verification. You'll also act as a security partner in design reviews across the engineering team, thinking through what happens when an attacker has physical access to edge machines.

Within your first year, you'll take end-to-end ownership of core backend platform components, stand up secrets management and software supply chain controls for edge deployments, and become the primary technical authority on security architecture across the engineering team.

If you're excited by distributed backend systems, systems programming, and applying that depth to zero-trust security for industrial control loops with no cloud safety net, we'd love to talk.

Key Responsibilities Backend Platform Engineering Work across our core backend services, including the I/O layer, deployment coordination, agent state management, and telemetry pipelines. Take responsibility for backend platform components from design through production. Write architectural decision records (ADRs), implement, test, and maintain operational reliability. Design and maintain APIs and service interfaces used across the platform, balancing flexibility with the operational constraints of edge deployment. Build and own observability and monitoring for backend services, ensuring issues surface quickly in disconnected, offline environments. Partner with the agent team on backend infrastructure for ML systems, focusing on data pipelines and state persistence. Design systems with simplicity and ease of troubleshooting in mind to support offline edge deployments. Participate in design and code reviews, maintaining high standards for the engineering team.

Security Infrastructure & Enablement Build and maintain offline authentication, authorization, and secrets management infrastructure for edge environments, including JWT verification, permission claims, and credential storage, rotation, and auditing. Establish and maintain secure software supply chain controls, including artifact signing, firmware integrity verification, and software bill of materials (SBOM) generation. Act as the technical escalation point for complex security architecture inquiries during customer IT/OT reviews, providing technical inputs while product management and leadership own the compliance documentation. Lead threat modeling and secure design reviews, and build automated security checks (boundary fuzzing, mock authentication failures, dependency vulnerability scans) into the deployment pipelines to catch risk before it reaches production. Design secure, tamper-resistant audit trails and local persistence for sensitive data, including authentication events, privilege usage, configuration changes, and agent policy weights and state, preventing unauthorized local tampering or extraction.

Required Qualifications Eight plus years of experience with a track record of designing, shipping, and maintaining complex backend services or platform infrastructure in production. Solid grounding in distributed systems fundamentals — service boundaries, state management, and failure handling — in production environments. Strong foundations in systems programming. We primarily write Python, but highly value experience in C++ or Rust. Advanced Python expertise is not required on day one if you have a strong systems background and are comfortable learning it on the job. Practical experience or strong interest in systems-level security, including hardening local operating systems (Linux systemd, Windows Services) and virtualized environments, hardware root-of-trust (TPMs), secure boot, and encrypted local storage on edge machines. Hands-on experience with PKI, TLS, cryptographic signing, and secrets management tools (e.g., OpenSSL). Comfort with ZeroMQ, Docker, and monitoring systems (e.g., Prometheus), alongside experience handling offline air-gapped deployments and remote update delivery.

Strongly Preferred: Prior experience in OT/ICS security — securing SCADA, PLC, or other industrial control environments, or working within IT/OT convergence programs. This is a significant plus for this role. Experience with digital twins and IIOT platforms. Why Join RLCore Solve a Genuinely Unique Challenge: Build and secure real-time physical control loops (water systems, energy grids) running on resource-constrained edge hardware, where every device is assumed hostile until proven otherwise. Own Meaningful Outcomes: The team is small enough that your architecture decisions stick, your security instincts shape the product, and your engineering judgment is trusted from day one. Build Technology That Matters: The problems you solve have direct consequences at industrial facilities. Competitive Compensation & Equity: We offer a competitive salary, meaningful equity participation, comprehensive health benefits, and generous vacation.