Engineering Manager II, Cloud Security

Qualia•Austin, TX

1d•Remote

About The Position

Qualia is hiring a player-coach Engineering Manager to build and lead its Cloud Security team. The role sets the direction for securing AWS, Kubernetes, and paths into production; hires and develops two senior engineers; owns delivery against the team roadmap; and remains hands-on with technical work such as reviewing Terraform plans and IAM policies. The position is responsible for making secure configurations the default through guardrails, organization-level policies, reusable modules adopted by product teams, and detection that identifies drift and abuse quickly. It works alongside Application Security, SRE, Platform, and InfoSec. The role is based in Austin, Texas, with a hybrid option for people nearby and remote possibilities for qualified candidates. Qualia is a remote-first development organization. The cloud environment includes AWS as the primary cloud, some Azure, limited GCP for Vertex AI, Kubernetes, Terraform, Okta, NodeJS/TypeScript services, MongoDB, ClickHouse, Grafana, and Go-based internal security tooling and detection services.

Requirements

At least 7 years in security, infrastructure, or platform engineering on production cloud systems.
At least 2 years managing or leading engineers.
Deep hands-on AWS security experience, including IAM and Organizations, VPC design, sops, logging, and services that carry sensitive data.
Production Kubernetes security experience, including RBAC, network policy, admission control, workload identity, and container image hygiene.
Infrastructure-as-code fluency, such as Terraform, and a record of shipping guardrails engineers adopted.
Experience building or scaling a cloud security function, or a major part of one, and demonstrating what changed as a result.
Strong written communication, including the ability to write architecture standards, incident post-mortems, and leadership risk summaries.
Ability to measure impact by exposure removed and time-to-detect, and provide quantitative examples.

Nice To Haves

Experience in fintech, real estate technology, or another regulated, high-liability domain.
Detection engineering or DFIR experience in cloud environments.
Hands-on use of LLMs or agents in a security workflow such as posture triage, access review, or alert enrichment.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow the Cloud Security team by hiring, coaching, and setting goals for engineers, and owning delivery against the roadmap.
Set cloud security architecture standards for AWS account structure, network segmentation, encryption, and workload isolation across Kubernetes clusters.
Drive least privilege for human and machine identities, including SSO into AWS, role design, just-in-time access, and secrets management.
Implement security guardrails as code, including service control policies, admission control, policy-as-code checks in CI, and hardened Terraform modules.
Build in-house posture checks in Go and policy-as-code across cloud resources and container images; turn findings into a prioritized, owned queue and reduce the backlog.
Build cloud-native detection with SRE using CloudTrail, audit logs, and runtime signals, and lead the cloud side of incident response.
Secure CI/CD, artifact provenance, and deployment credentials as production assets.
Partner across engineering by reviewing proposals and representing Cloud Security in SOC 2 and customer security reviews.
Apply AI to security workflows such as posture findings, access reviews, or alert triage where appropriate.