Lead Security Engineer

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence•Seattle, WA

30d•Onsite

About The Position

The infrastructure team is looking for a security leader who can identify and prioritize our biggest security concerns as well as contribute to resolving them. In this role, you’ll work collaboratively across the organization to understand our technical landscape, organize and prioritize security concerns, and directly contribute to projects to secure our systems. You will lead our company’s security program: establishing how we conduct security evaluations of programs, auditing systems for security concerns, prioritizing security investments, and working across the company to reduce our security risks.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree and 8–10 years of overall software/infrastructure engineering experience.
5+ years focused specifically on security engineering, application security, or security architecture, ideally including time owning a security program.
Hands-on experience conducting security and compliance audits, and directly implementing or assessing controls.
Experience with NIST 800-171.
A track record of stepping up to ambiguous, high-stakes problems rather than waiting for a fully scoped mandate — this role will require building a program largely from the ground up.
Strong ability to advise non-security technical leaders (e.g., engineering directors/managers) — translating technical risk into clear, actionable recommendations they can act on without a security background.
Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time.
The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand.
Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.
The ability to observe details at close range.
Can work under deadlines.

Responsibilities

Establish and maintain documentation for Ai2's organizational approach to security, including policies, standards, and system security plans (SSPs).
Maintain and prioritize a backlog of security investments.
Conduct in-depth security assessments to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities across cloud infrastructure, ML pipelines, and application code.
Investigate and respond to security incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and drive remediation to closure.
Build systems and tooling that improve security compliance, observability, and governance (e.g., audit logging, access control, vulnerability management, configuration baselines).
Partner across research and engineering teams to address security concerns.
Define and evolve security standards, secure-development practices, and documentation to raise the organization's overall security maturity.
Evaluate and secure SaaS platforms and tools that make up our environment (vendor risk assessments, access reviews, data handling review, multi-tenant data isolation).
Serve as the organization's trusted voice on security: act as a hands-on advisor and sounding board to organizational leaders, helping translate security risk into practical, actionable guidance for teams without deep security expertise.