or apply directly on Thorn's site. We never take the application ourselves.
Is this posting real?
- This role has been open
- 27 days Thorn's roles stay open a median of 27 days
- Reposted
- No
- Salary listed
- Yes 100% of Thorn's roles list one
- Ghost-job risk at Thorn
- high 2 stale, 0 reposted of 5 open
- Hiring momentum
- 5 roles opened in the last 90 days ↑ up vs. the prior 90 days
- Last confirmed on the employer's board
- 2026-09-17
Measured from postings appearing on and disappearing from Thorn's own greenhouse board since 2026-08-03. Full hiring picture for Thorn.
About this role
As a Staff Engineer at Thorn, you will lead the development and operation of backend services and data-processing pipelines aimed at detecting child sexual abuse material. Your role involves collaborating with cross-functional teams to design scalable systems, making architectural decisions, and mentoring fellow engineers. You will also engage in coding, code reviews, and troubleshooting while ensuring the reliability and sustainability of the systems you help build.
- benefits
- 2/5
- freshness
- 4/5
- career value
- 4/5
- role clarity
- 5/5
- pay transparency
- 5/5
Scored from the posting itself — how clearly the role is described, how much it says about pay and benefits, and how recently it was listed. Not a judgement of Thorn as an employer.
What you need
- Commitment to putting the children served at the center of everything you do
- Substantial experience building and operating backend services in production, including experience with Python
- Hands-on experience deploying or supporting production applications in Kubernetes
- Experience building and operating services in a production cloud environment
- Ability to contribute across unfamiliar parts of a codebase or technical domain
- Strong architectural judgment and consideration of broader system impact
Nice to have
- Experience building, scaling, and monitoring high-volume systems or data-processing pipelines
- Experience building software, platforms, APIs, or tooling for other developers
- Experience with AWS, Terraform, PostgreSQL, or Elasticsearch
What you get
- Compensation range of $150,000-$207,000/year
- Remote-first work model with occasional travel for company gatherings and meetings
- Broad range of employee benefits
Worth weighing
- No specific details on the technologies beyond Python and Kubernetes
- Role involves on-call rotations for system reliability and incident response
- The mission-driven nature of the organization may require emotional resilience
Summarised from Thorn's posting. Read the full original.
Listed by Thorn on their greenhouse job board, last confirmed open on 2026-09-17. PitchMeAI is not the employer.
More roles at Thorn
- Senior Software EngineerRemote (US-Based)
- Staff Machine Learning EngineerRemote (US-Based)