Application Security Engineer

Vestwell•Austin, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Vestwell is seeking an Application Security Engineer to help secure the applications and identity integrations that power its financial technology products. The role focuses on analyzing and protecting NestJS applications, applying application security practices throughout the software development lifecycle, and supporting identity capabilities in OIDC integrations and internal applications. The engineer will work with software engineering, platform, infrastructure, and product teams to identify risk, implement practical mitigations, and make secure-by-default development easier. The position suits someone with hands-on application security skills, working knowledge of modern authentication and authorization protocols, and an interest in deepening identity-security expertise. The role is based in Vestwell's New York City, Austin, King of Prussia, or Scottsdale office as part of its hybrid in-office operation. The expected base salary range is $140,000–$150,000; the role is also eligible for the Company Bonus Pool and new-hire equity. Vestwell describes its benefits as including comprehensive health benefits, generous time off, a dedicated Employee Wellbeing Committee, hybrid-work flexibility, collaborative offices, and a competitive 401(k) plan.

Requirements

2–4 years of professional experience in application security, product security, software engineering, or a closely related discipline.
Experience securing Node.js and TypeScript applications; familiarity with NestJS is a strong plus.
Working knowledge of OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect concepts and common implementation pitfalls.
Exposure to identity provider and/or relying-party implementations, integrations, or security assessments.
Solid understanding of authentication and authorization, including RBAC, least privilege, claims, scopes, permissions, sessions, and tokens.
Ability to review code across APIs, web applications, and background jobs, with support from senior engineers for complex architectural or distributed-systems questions.
Familiarity with web and API security risks, including OWASP Top 10, OWASP API Security Top 10, broken access control, SSRF, injection, XSS, CSRF, insecure deserialization, and misconfiguration.
Basic understanding of secure token handling, JWT validation, JWKS, signing algorithms, and token storage considerations.
Some experience with CI/CD and developer workflows, or willingness to learn how to integrate security into them with minimal friction.
Good communication skills and ability to explain security findings and risk to technical teammates.
A pragmatic, collaborative approach, including willingness to learn, ask questions, and work with senior engineers to propose and implement proportional controls.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to identity platforms or libraries such as Auth0, Okta, Keycloak, Cognito, Azure AD/Entra ID, or comparable systems.
Familiarity with SAML integrations for single sign-on.
Exposure to API gateways, microservices, event-driven systems, and cloud-native deployments.
Familiarity with containers, infrastructure as code, secrets management, and cloud IAM basics.
Experience with security tools such as Burp Suite, Semgrep, CodeQL, Snyk, Dependabot, OWASP ZAP, or equivalent tools.
Familiarity with security standards such as OWASP ASVS or NIST SSDF.
Interest in pursuing relevant security certifications.

Responsibilities

Analyze NestJS and TypeScript applications for authentication, authorization, input validation, injection, session, API, business-logic, and data-protection vulnerabilities.
Apply and refine secure development patterns for NestJS, including guards, interceptors, middleware, decorators, validation, error handling, logging, configuration, and dependency management.
Contribute to security for OIDC integrations and identity-platform capabilities, including when Vestwell acts as an identity provider or relying party.
Review OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect flows, including authorization code with PKCE, refresh tokens, client authentication, scopes, consent, state, nonce, redirect URI validation, and token lifetimes, with guidance on complex cases.
Help apply and maintain authorization models using RBAC and, where appropriate, claims-based or policy-based access control.
Review access-control boundaries across services, APIs, tenants, users, roles, permissions, and administrative functions.
Participate in threat modeling, security design reviews, architecture reviews, and secure code reviews.
Contribute to security requirements, reusable libraries, reference implementations, and developer guidance that reduce recurring risk.
Support security testing and detection, including SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, secret scanning, API testing, dependency monitoring, and targeted security testing.
Partner with engineering teams to remediate vulnerabilities, prioritize findings by exploitability and business impact, and verify fixes.
Monitor application and identity security signals, support incident investigations, and help maintain playbooks for account takeover, token compromise, authorization bypass, credential abuse, and related events.
Help maintain security documentation, standards, risk exceptions, and audit and customer-assurance evidence.
Stay current on application security, identity, OAuth/OIDC, browser security, API security, cloud security, and emerging attack techniques.