Founding Security Software Engineer (AI Startup)

We've partnered with a fast-growing, AI-native startup on a high-impact opportunity: their first Security Software Engineer. This is a true greenfield role where you'll own the security vision from day one, building the foundation for how the company designs, defends, and ships secure software and AI systems at scale.

You'll architect security from the ground up, embedding automated defenses directly into the development lifecycle, securing AI/ML pipelines, and driving a GitOps-native approach to security across the org. This is a rare opportunity to shape security culture and tooling at a company building cutting-edge AI products, with the autonomy and impact of a founding hire.

What You'll Do

• Define and lead the security strategy and roadmap from the ground up
• Build automated, developer-friendly security tooling and guardrails
• Secure AI/ML pipelines, including model training, deployment, and inference infrastructure

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• Champion a GitOps security model, embedding security checks directly into CI/CD
• Partner closely with engineering teams to remediate risks and build a "secure-by-design" culture

Must-Haves

• 5+ years in AppSec or InfraSec, ideally in high-growth, fast-paced environments
• Strong hands-on coding skills (Python, Go, C/C++, or Java) - you can ship production code, not just review it

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• Deep AWS security expertise; GCP/Azure experience a strong plus
• An attacker's mindset paired with a builder's collaborative approach to remediation
• Comfort with modern observability and a "you build it, you run it" philosophy
• Experience integrating agentic AI workflows into the dev lifecycle for real-time security feedback

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience securing AI/ML workloads: prompt injection defense, model weight protection
• Strong Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) expertise, especially multi-tenant security and resource isolation

Logistics

• Location: On-site in San Francisco, CA
• Compensation: $260K–$380K base + equity
• Visa sponsorship and transfers available