Keep the internal security program and the product tightly linked, so what the team runs on Perplexity every day becomes what we ship, and customer feedback improves how we defend ourselves.
Set the roadmap for Security Engineering, balancing incident load, risk reduction, and long-term platform investments, and make clear prioritization calls.
Own security incident response operations: on-call health, escalation, cross-team coordination during incidents, and postmortems that lead to real fixes.
Drive an AI-first security program. Push the team to automate investigation, response, and remediation with agents, and hold that automation to a high bar for accuracy and safety.
Partner with engineering and infrastructure leaders to get security work into their roadmaps, from threat models and design reviews to least-privilege access and secure-by-default libraries.
Represent Security Engineering in enterprise customer security reviews, external researcher and bug bounty engagements, and audits.
Build the team's operating rhythm: clear ownership, metrics that matter (time to detect, time to contain, open risk), and written standards others can follow.
Stay hands-on: review designs and code, run investigations when needed, and keep a working understanding of the systems the team defends.
QUALIFICATIONS
8+ years of engineering experience in security, with at least 3 years managing security or infrastructure engineering teams.
Deep hands-on background in at least two of: detection and response, cloud security (AWS preferred), application or product security, offensive security, or identity and access management.
Experience leading incident response for serious security incidents, including technical investigation, containment, and communication with executives and customers.
Strong management practice: clear feedback, effective 1:1s, career development, and a track record of hiring and retaining strong senior engineers.
Comfortable with modern infrastructure (Kubernetes, cloud-native services, CI/CD) and able to engage credibly with engineers on design and code.
Ability to make good tradeoffs under pressure and explain risk clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
Experience shipping software products to external customers, ideally security products, including working with design partners and turning customer feedback into a roadmap.
Experience building security programs at a fast-growing company, where you built more than you bought.
Bonus: experience securing AI/ML systems, LLM applications, or autonomous agents, or using AI to scale security operations.
Bonus: experience supporting enterprise compliance programs (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP) from the engineering side.
