# What Aikido Security screens for when it hires engineers

Source: https://www.techinterview.org/post/3233477246/aikido-security-engineering-interview/
Updated: 2026-08-05 · techinterview.org

Aikido Security crossed a billion-dollar valuation this year on a $60 million round, three years after two founders started it in Ghent. It runs around 170 people, opened a San Francisco office with Chicago next, and is hiring into product engineering faster than most companies its age. The interview loop is short, personal, and weighted toward real work rather than algorithm trivia.

The company builds a single platform that folds together the security tools most teams buy separately: static analysis of your code, scanning of open-source dependencies, checks on containers and infrastructure-as-code, secrets detection, cloud posture, surface monitoring, and a runtime layer called Zen that sits inside the app. The pitch to developers is noise reduction. Most scanners drown you in findings that never mattered, and Aikido's reason to exist is deciding which of those findings is real and reachable. That focus shapes what they ask you.

## The four conversations

Aikido lays its process out plainly. It starts with an informal call, usually with a recruiter or hiring manager, to see whether there is a fit worth pursuing. Low-pressure, mostly about your background, what you want, and why security tooling interests you at all. Have a real answer to that last one. People who apply because cybersecurity is hot right now get sniffed out fast at a company whose founders came up building developer tools.

The second stage goes deeper on skills and on culture. Expect to walk through past projects in detail, with follow-ups that keep pushing until they hit the edge of what you actually did versus what your team did. Aikido states its values bluntly: humble and curious, transparent, disagree then commit, ownership, keep it simple. The "disagree then commit" one is not decoration. Interviewers will probe how you handle a technical argument you lost, and whether you can hold a strong opinion without turning it into a standoff.

Third is the part that separates Aikido from the average loop: a challenge where you work alongside the people you would join. Sometimes that is a take-home you then discuss, sometimes a live pairing session on something close to their real code. The point is not a clever trick. They want to see how you read unfamiliar code, how you narrow a problem, and whether you are pleasant to build with for two hours. Ask questions during it. Grinding in silence reads worse than thinking out loud.

The last stage is a two-way conversation, often with a founder or senior leader, where questions run both directions. By this point they are checking conviction and asking you to check theirs. Come with sharp questions about the roadmap, how they measure false-positive rates, or how the US expansion changes the engineering org. Bring a couple that show you grasp the business as well as the code.

## What the product makes them ask

Because Aikido's edge is precision, technical rounds gravitate toward reasoning about signal and noise rather than memorized data structures. A static-analysis or dependency-scanning role might get asked how you would tell whether a vulnerable dependency is actually exploitable in a given codebase, which is the reachability problem that separates a useful alert from a nagging one. A cloud or full-stack candidate might work through how to dedupe the same underlying issue reported by three different scanners, or how to rank a thousand findings so a developer looks at the right five first.

The stack skews practical. Job listings point to a Java developer track, full-stack roles built around cloud, a database performance specialist, and several AI engineering roles focused on code audit and infrastructure pentesting. That last cluster reflects where the product is going: using models to triage and explain findings, and to generate fixes a developer can accept with one click. If you interview for one of those, be ready to talk about prompt reliability, how you keep a model from suggesting a fix that breaks the build, and how you would measure whether the AI triage actually beats the rule it replaced.

A few questions phrased close to how they land in the room:

- "Here's a scanner output with 400 findings. Walk me through how you'd get a developer to trust it."

- "How would you check whether this CVE in a transitive dependency is reachable from our code?"

- "You and a teammate disagree on whether to block a build on this finding. How does that conversation go?"

- "Design the data model for storing findings across code, containers, and cloud so we can tell when two are the same issue."

## The customer-facing engineering roles

The US push has opened roles that blur the line between engineering and the customer: forward deployed engineer, customer security engineer, cloud advocate. These sit closer to the sales and support edge, and the loop shifts with them. You still get a technical screen, but a chunk of the assessment is whether you can sit with a skeptical security team, understand their existing tooling, and configure Aikido to cut their alert volume in a way they believe. Expect a scenario where you walk a mock customer through triaging findings, or explain to a developer why a flagged package matters. Communication carries as much weight as the code here. If you like being the person who translates between the security team and the developers who resent them, this is the track.

## Round structure at a glance

| Stage | Who runs it | What happens | What Aikido is checking |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Intro call | Recruiter or hiring manager | Informal chat about background and motivation | Basic fit and genuine interest in security tooling |
| Skills and culture | Hiring manager and a future peer | Detailed review of past work plus values questions | Real depth of experience and "disagree then commit" temperament |
| Challenge | Potential teammates | Take-home or live pairing on realistic code | How you read unfamiliar code and work with a team |
| Final | Founder or senior leader | Two-way conversation, questions both directions | Conviction, judgment, and whether you interview them back |

## Comp, level, and how to read the offer

Aikido does not publish salary bands, and ranges vary sharply by location. Engineering pay for a Ghent-based hire sits in the European market, which runs well below US totals for the same title, while the new San Francisco roles get priced against American startups fighting over the same security talent. Equity matters more than usual here. Joining a three-year-old company that just crossed a billion in valuation means your options are struck against that mark, so the upside rides on where the next rounds go, not where it stands today. Ask for the strike price, the current preferred price, and the size of the option pool, and check comparable Series B security startups on levels.fyi before you anchor on any single number.

## How to prep without wasting time

Skip the grind-500-LeetCode-problems plan. It does not match this loop. Spend the time getting fluent in the actual domain instead: read how reachability analysis works, understand why software bills of materials and transitive dependencies generate so much noise, and be able to explain the difference between static analysis, dependency scanning, dynamic testing, and runtime protection without notes. Play with the product. Aikido has a free tier and a lot of open source, Zen included, and an afternoon connecting it to a repo will teach you more about their design choices than any prep article.

The thing to remember about Aikido is that it hires for taste in a crowded market. Anyone can run a scanner. The engineers they want are the ones who can look at a wall of red and know which three lines a busy developer will thank them for.