Lead Security Engineer

Salient•San Francisco, CA

6d•$200,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

Salient is seeking a hands-on Lead Security Engineer to establish a robust and repeatable security operating system. This is a Staff-level individual contributor role reporting to senior leadership. As the sole dedicated security hire, you will be supported by infrastructure, IT, and People Operations teams. Your responsibilities will encompass compliance operations, boundary testing, access and vulnerability management, detection and response, and the automation necessary for these processes to be repeatable and provable. The prioritization of these tasks will be determined by risk assessment in collaboration with leadership. Expertise in all areas is not expected upon arrival.

Requirements

Own outcomes end to end and ship weekly with a small team, making decisions with incomplete information.
Possess a software engineering background, with the ability to write production-quality code and build tested tooling and automation.
Have hands-on experience securing cloud infrastructure and identity and access management (IAM/PAM), including investigating suspicious access.
Prioritize based on real risk, clearly articulate coverage gaps, and explain tradeoffs to leadership.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating SOC 2, PCI, or bank security controls and producing audit evidence.
Experience leading SOC 2 or PCI audits with external auditors.
Experience with detection engineering, incident response, or vulnerability management.
Interest or experience in threat-modeling AI systems, LLM tool use, or data flows through model providers.
Strong writing skills for runbooks, questionnaires, and customer security reviews, with a proven track record of partnering with engineering teams.
Experience with financial services, payment data, or other regulated consumer data.

Responsibilities

Develop and manage the operating procedure for SOC 2, PCI, enterprise security questionnaires, and bank-specific security requirements, ensuring distinct implementation, approval, submission, and acceptance phases.
Conduct security testing across cloud/IAM, application, payment, and AI boundaries, including synthetic tests for recordings, transcripts, logs, tools, storage, and providers.
Investigate access anomalies.
Implement and monitor stronger IAM/PAM controls.
Perform network and vulnerability scanning, ensuring all findings are tracked through service-owner remediation and retest, or an authorized exception.
Create incident runbooks, develop useful detections, and establish proven handoffs between security, service teams, and backup personnel.
Automate security controls and evidence collection, including tested evidence connectors, asset reconciliation, obligation tracking, and claim-review workflows.