Senior Engineer

TRM Labs Senior Engineer (Intel Team)

Location

São Paulo, Brazil

Location type

Remote

Employment type

Full time

Build a Safer World.

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. TRM's platforms enable investigators to trace illicit activity, build cases, and construct operating pictures of threat networks. Leading agencies and businesses worldwide rely on TRM to make the world safer and more secure.

TRM's Intel team runs at the intersection of intelligence analysts, back-end systems, and AI. This role sits at that intersection. Its mandate is to make TRM's intelligence collection meaningfully better with AI. You'll work directly alongside our intel analysts to understand how they collect and act on intelligence, then build the AI-powered products, tooling, and infrastructure that let them do it faster and at greater scale.

We're looking for a senior engineer with genuine product sense, someone who can sit with a semi-technical analyst, see past the surface-level request, and identify the highest-impact, scalable thing to build. The failure mode we're explicitly hiring against is an engineer who rapidly ships a pile of narrow automations that pick at minor annoyances but don't move the needle. We want sticky, real products that advance the mission.

This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to stay deeply technical while also shaping what gets built, not just how.

The impact you’ll have here:

• Embed directly with our intel analysts to deeply understand their goals, constraints, and workflows, then translate those into technical solutions with clear success criteria.

• Identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve intelligence collection — bringing a product lens to prioritization, not just an engineering one — and productize your work so it's adopted and durable.

• Design, build, and own AI-powered internal applications end-to-end: back-end services, APIs, data storage, the back-end infrastructure they run on, and user-facing interfaces.

• Develop custom agentic solutions leveraging state-of-the-art models (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) to augment and scale intelligence workflows.

• Own projects end-to-end — technical design, architecture, scoping, delivery, iteration, and ongoing support.

• Build reliable, scalable systems on which analysts depend day to day.

• Continuously evaluate impact and iterate based on real outcomes for the Intel team.

What we’re looking for:

• 6+ years full-stack software engineering experience building scalable web applications, services, and APIs

• Strong product sense — the ability to zoom out, spot the highest-impact and most scalable solution, and ship it as something people actually keep using. This is the bar-raising skill for this role.

• Proficiency in Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript, with strong back-end and systems engineering skills.

• Experience building backend systems, working with various datastores such as (Postgres/pgvector, Pinecone, Redis) and designing APIs.

• Demonstrated curiosity and hands-on experience with AI tools and applications - using modern AI models, agentic IDEs, or building AI-enabled workflows or prototypes.

• A high degree of ownership and initiative, with the ability to operate independently in ambiguous problem spaces

• Strong communication and the ability to build trust with semi-technical stakeholders (our analysts) and explain technical trade-offs clearly.

We're deliberately open on background: a strong back-end/systems engineer and a strong data/ML-leaning engineer can both thrive here. Seniority, sharpness, drive, and product sense matter more than a specific profile.

About the Team:

• The team operates on a weekly sprint schedule. Individuals on the team are tasked to lead projects as technical anchors, and given a chance to grow and take ownership according to their level and goals. We work closely with our internal stakeholders to deliver impactful features to our internal customers and the company.

• The team’s culture is built on psychological safety wherein team members build rapport and trust-based relationships with teammates, hold each other accountable and to a high bar, collaborate extensively, and have lots of fun along the way.

• The team’s timezone is a mix of EST and PST with at least 6 hours of overlap with PST (8 am to 2 pm PST)

• On-Call: We have an on-call rotation that is specific to internal tools. In this role, the internal tools engineer is responsible for triaging customer support requests from specific Slack channels pertaining to internal tools.

Work Week Travel: This role requires participation in in-person R&D work weeks, typically 1–2 times per quarter, at a TRM hub or other designated location. Work weeks may be scheduled with as little as 14 days’ notice, and some roles may require additional travel based on team and cross-functional needs. TRM coordinates and covers approved travel, lodging, and workspace. Accommodations are available for legitimate caregiving, health, immigration, and similar constraints.

Life at TRM

We are building a safer world. That promise shows up in how we work every day.

TRM moves FAST. We are a high-velocity, high-ownership team that expects clarity, follow-through, and impact. People who thrive here are energized by hard problems, experimentation, and continuous feedback. If something takes months elsewhere, it will ship here in days.

Our work sits at the intersection of AI, national security, and fighting crime. The problems are complex, the stakes are real, and the environment evolves quickly. The pace and intensity of the work reflect the importance of the mission. As a result, the way we operate requires a high level of ownership, adaptability, collaboration, and creative problem-solving.

At TRM, you should expect:

• Priorities and targets to change quickly

• Operating with a high degree of ambiguity

• A high level of personal ownership and accountability

• Close collaboration across teams and functions

• Frequent, high-touch communication

• Creative problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking

• A pace that rewards urgency, adaptability, and outcomes

This environment is energizing for people who enjoy building, solving hard problems, and making progress in situations that are not always fully defined. It also requires thriving in ambiguity, adjusting course as new information emerges, and maintaining focus and positivity in a fast-moving and intense environment.

We also recognize that this style of operating is not for everyone. If you are primarily optimizing for predictability or a consistently balanced workload, we encourage you to use the interview process to pressure-test whether t