Head of IT & Security

OpenEd

2d • $195,000 - $220,000

About The Position

As the founding Security Engineer at OpenEd, you'll join a small, high-impact team changing the nature of education. This is a truly unique opportunity to be the founding member of our security team, and to ensure we earn the trust of families that their student's education — and data — is safe with us.

You'll own the IT, identity, and compliance programs directly, with a broad range of responsibilities and the autonomy to tackle them as you see fit. We serve over 100,000 students, which means the security bar isn't theoretical: it's the reason families keep trusting us with their kids.

You'll own four programs end to end:
Identity & access: SSO/SAML, MFA, provisioning, a least-privilege access model, and reliable onboarding/offboarding.
Corporate/IT security: Endpoint/MDM, SaaS and vendor risk, the phishing and awareness program, and incident response playbooks.
Compliance: Drive SOC 2 (Type II), map FERPA/COPPA/state privacy controls, and own audits and their outcomes.
Application security: Contribute to key AppSec initiatives (SAST/DAST/SCA in CI), triage and drive remediation with engineers, and run external pen test audits.

Requirements

• 6+ years in security, ideally in a regulated vertical (finance, education, healthcare).
• Hands-on across IT/identity and security operations.
• Experience taking an organization through SOC 2 (or ISO 27001).
• Experience establishing and driving human-centered processes for ensuring security across an organization.
• Strong judgment on risk.
• Deeply technical with excellent communication skills.
• Hands-on experience designing or running a zero-trust environment (e.g., identity-based access, continuous verification, no implicit network trust).

Nice To Haves

• Edtech/FERPA/privacy background
• CISSP
• OSCP

Responsibilities

• Own the IT, identity, and compliance programs.
• Manage Identity & access programs including SSO/SAML, MFA, provisioning, least-privilege access model, and onboarding/offboarding.
• Oversee Corporate/IT security including Endpoint/MDM, SaaS and vendor risk, phishing and awareness program, and incident response playbooks.
• Drive SOC 2 (Type II) compliance, map FERPA/COPPA/state privacy controls, and manage audits.
• Contribute to Application Security initiatives (SAST/DAST/SCA in CI), triage and remediate vulnerabilities with engineers, and manage external pen test audits.
• Automate security controls.
• Design systems that are robust to human failure.
• Set security strategy, choose tooling, and decide sequencing.
• Partner closely with engineering, IT, and legal.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed