Senior Software Engineer – Event Sourcing & Stream Processing

Remote from: USA
Salary, yearly, USD: 137,500 - 183,500
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 11 Jun 2026
Apply before: 11 Jul 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 17 / 4

The architect of exposure management, helping you know, expose and close cyber risk with robust cloud security and vulnerability management tools.

Computer & Network Security
2002

AI Summary

Tenable is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the VM Platform team, focusing on building high-throughput, event-driven pipelines for processing massive volumes of asset and vulnerability data. The role involves designing complex stateful processing logic using JVM technologies (Java/Kotlin) and stream processing with Kafka. You will architect for scale, transitioning systems to a new architecture, and own your stack with DevOps practices. This position offers the chance to work on the backend of Tenable's flagship Exposure Management platform.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight The role requires deep experience in distributed systems, stream processing, and high-volume data handling, which are complex technical challenges. Senior-level engineers with this specialization are expected to design and implement robust, scalable solutions.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range of $137,500 - $183,500 is competitive for a Senior Software Engineer specializing in event sourcing and stream processing. The median of $160,500 aligns well with market rates for similar roles in major tech hubs.

Key Skills

Java Kotlin Apache Kafka Stream Processing Distributed Systems Big Data Terraform Datadog Event Sourcing Microservices

Cover Letter Sample

I am writing to express my enthusiastic interest in the Senior Software Engineer - Event Sourcing & Stream Processing position at Tenable. With over 4 years of backend engineering experience focusing on high-volume data processing and distributed systems, I have a proven track record of building scalable, event-driven pipelines. My deep proficiency in JVM technologies (Java/Kotlin) and hands-on experience with Apache Kafka align perfectly with the requirements of this role.

In my previous role, I designed and maintained stateful stream processing systems that handled millions of events per second, ensuring data accuracy and real-time availability. I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to Tenable's Exposure Management platform, solving complex big data challenges. I am particularly drawn to the ownership aspect of the role, where I can leverage my DevOps skills with Terraform and Datadog to ensure robust production systems.

I look forward to the possibility of discussing how my technical expertise and passion for building resilient systems can support Tenable's mission.

Possible Interview Questions

Describe your experience with Kafka. How have you designed consumers and producers to handle high throughput while ensuring exactly-once semantics?

I have used Kafka in production to build event-driven pipelines processing over 1 million events per second. For exactly-once semantics, I implemented idempotent producers and transactional reads, and used Kafka Streams' exactly-once processing guarantees. I also carefully tuned partition counts and consumer group configurations to balance throughput and latency.

How do you approach designing a system that collapses millions of incoming events into a single accurate state record?

I use a stateful stream processing approach, often with Kafka Streams or Flink, maintaining state stores to aggregate events. I implement event-time processing and handle late-arriving data with allowed lateness and watermarking. The logic computes the latest state by applying accumulation or compaction based on event timestamps and deduplication keys.

Can you explain the challenges of eventual consistency in a microservices architecture and how you have addressed them?

Eventual consistency requires careful handling of stale reads and write conflicts. I address this by using event-driven communication with idempotent operations, versioning data with timestamps or sequence numbers, and implementing conflict resolution strategies like last-write-wins or CRDTs. Monitoring with Datadog helps detect inconsistencies.

Describe a time you optimized a JVM-based application for performance. What profiling tools did you use and what changes did you make?

I used JProfiler and YourKit to identify memory leaks and GC bottlenecks. I optimized heap sizes, switched to G1GC, and reduced object allocations by reusing objects and using primitive collections. I also tuned Kafka producer buffer sizes and batch settings to improve throughput.

How do you ensure fault tolerance and data resiliency in a stream processing system?

I design services to be stateless when possible, using external state stores like Kafka compacted topics or databases. For stateful processing, I leverage Kafka's offset management and replay capabilities. I implement graceful shutdown with checkpointing and use circuit breakers and retries with exponential backoff for downstream dependencies.

Who is Tenable?

Tenable® is the Exposure Management company. 44,000 organizations around the globe rely on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk. Our global employees support 65 percent of the Fortune 500, 45 percent of the Global 2000, and large government agencies. Come be part of our journey!

What makes Tenable such a great place to work?

Ask a member of our team and they’ll answer, “Our people!” We work together to build and innovate best-in-class cybersecurity solutions for our customers; all while creating a culture of belonging, respect, and excellence where we can be our best selves. When you’re part of our #OneTenable team, you can expect to partner with some of the most talented and passionate people in the industry, and have the support and resources you need to do work that truly matters. We deliver results that exceed expectations and we win together!

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. without sponsorship. We are unable to provide sponsorship for work visas of any kind at the time of hire, or at any point during employment. This includes, but is not limited to: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, J-1, etc.

Your Role:

Tenable is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our VM Platform team. Our team sits at the center of our Tenable One architecture; we ingest massive volumes of assets and find data from collection teams, process it to calculate the “state of the world” for our customers, and feed it to downstream search and reporting products.

We are not just building web apps; we are solving a complex Big Data problem. You will build and maintain the high-throughput, event-driven pipelines responsible for processing the history of assets and vulnerabilities. You will move beyond simple CRUD operations to design systems that handle massive scale, ensuring that when we say an asset is vulnerable (or patched), that data is accurate and available in real-time.

To be considered for this role, you must meet one of the following criteria:

Hybrid: Ability to commute to our Columbia, MD/Northern VA office.
Hybrid: Ability to commute to our Boston, MA office.
Remote: Currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA

Your Opportunity:

Build the Future of Exposure Management: We are currently developing the backend that powers Tenable’s flagship Exposure Management (EM) platform. You will be building the future that powers our EM platform.
Solve Complex Data Problems: Work on “team-named data processing” challenges. You will design logic that collapses millions of incoming findings into a single, accurate state record.
Architect for Scale: Transition our systems to a new architecture designed to be faster, cheaper, and more reliable. Your work will unblock integrations across the entire company.
Own Your Stack (DevOps): We support our services in the wild. You won’t just write code; you will use Terraform and Datadog to deploy, monitor, and ensure the health of your services in production.

What You’ll Need:

4+ years of Backend Engineering experience with a focus on high-volume data processing or distributed systems.
Strong JVM Proficiency: Deep experience with Java, Kotlin,is required. You should understand memory management and performance within the JVM ecosystem.
Stream Processing Architecture: Proven experience with Kafka (ideally), AWS Kinesis, et al. You understand topics, partitions, and how to process teams of data asynchronously
To be considered for this role, you must meet one of the following criteria: Hybrid with the ability to commute to our Columbia, MD/Northern VA office, Hybrid with the ability to commute to our Boston, MA office, or Remote: Currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Distributed Systems Knowledge: You understand the challenges of microservices, eventual consistency, and data resiliency.
Stateful Processing Logic: Experience calculating “state” from a history of events. You understand how to take a stream of raw data and “collapse” it into a current status.
DevOps Mindset: Hands-on experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code and observability tools like Datadog to monitor metrics and graphs.
Database Experience: Proficiency with SQL and NoSQL data stores (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or similar) to store and retrieve state data.

And Ideally:

Experience with Event Sourcing or CQRS patterns.
While security background is a plus, we value Big Data/Data Pipeline experience first. If you can process data at scale, we can teach you the security domain.

#LI-LP1

This is the base pay range for this position. Compensation for the role will depend on a number of factors, including the candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies, location and experience, and may fall outside of the range shown. Employees are also eligible for variable compensation in addition to base pay (commission for sales roles, bonus for non-sales roles), depending on company and individual performance. Tenable also offers a variety of comprehensive and competitive benefits which include: medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance; 401(k) retirement savings with company match; an employee stock purchase plan; an employee referral program; flexible spending accounts; an Employee Assistance Program (EAP); education assistance; parental leave; paid time off (PTO); company-paid holidays; health and wellness events; and community programs.

US Pay Range

$137,500—$183,500 USD

We’re committed to promoting Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) at Tenable – through all equal employment opportunity laws and regulations at the international, federal, state and local levels. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please contact [email protected] for further assistance.

Tenable Data Consent Statement

Tenable is committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal data. This Notice describes how we collect and use your personal data during and after your working relationship with us, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). Please click here to review.

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