Application Security Engineering Lead

Athene • West Des Moines, IA

2d

About The Position

At Athene, security is an enabler of innovation. As our Application Security Engineering Lead, you'll help define how secure software is built across the enterprise by engineering scalable security capabilities that empower developers while protecting our business, customers, and partners. Working at the intersection of Application Security, Cloud Security, and Identity Engineering, you'll collaborate with Software Engineering, Cloud Platform Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, and Information Security to design reusable security platforms, automation, and developer-first capabilities. You'll also help shape how Athene securely adopts emerging technologies—including AI-powered applications and autonomous workloads—while solving complex engineering challenges at enterprise scale. Backed by Apollo Global Management, Athene combines financial strength, innovation, and a collaborative culture built on our BEAM values—Believe in your co-workers, Engage actively, Act like owners, and Make it happen. You'll have the opportunity to influence enterprise security strategy while helping one of the fastest-growing retirement services organizations continue to innovate securely.

Requirements

• 6+ years of relevant experience in application security, software security engineering, cloud security, identity security, or relevant experience.
• Deep expertise in secure software engineering practices, including OWASP Top 10, threat modeling, secure architecture, SAST, DAST, Software Composition Analysis (SCA), API security, and secure SDLC methodologies.
• Strong technical expertise implementing modern identity and authentication technologies, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML, JWT, mTLS , PKI, certificate management, and secure service-to-service authentication.
• Hands-on experience securing AWS and Azure environments, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and/or CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, and developing security automation using Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, or similar languages.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions through collaboration, innovation, critical thinking, adaptability, creativity, a bias for action, and AI fluency to improve developer experience and strengthen enterprise security.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science , Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve reusable application and identity security capabilities, including identity-as-code, policy-as-code, developer self-service tools, security libraries, and platform integrations that make secure development the default.
• Partner with engineering teams to embed secure authentication, authorization, API security, and secure software design throughout the SDLC using modern standards including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML, JWT, mTLS , and PKI.
• Lead cloud identity engineering across AWS and Azure by developing scalable identity solutions, Infrastructure as Code guardrails, security automation, and modern workload identity capabilities.
• Drive security engineering innovation through automation, AI-enabled solutions, developer enablement, technical mentorship, and continuous improvement while advancing Athene's Security Guardians program.
• Define and implement enterprise security patterns for non-human identities, machine identities, AI agents, secrets management, certificate lifecycle management, and workload authentication to support the next generation of cloud-native applications.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior