Lead Security Engineer

Benepass

7d•$190,000 - $230,000•Remote

About The Position

As a Lead Security Engineer at Benepass, you will build, operationalize, and scale the security engineering practices that protect our benefits platform and the sensitive employee, benefits, and financial data it processes. You will work across application security, cloud security, security architecture, supply chain security, detection engineering, and vulnerability management, balancing security depth with the speed and pragmatism required at Benepass. Reporting to the Head of Infosec & GRC, you will be a senior individual contributor and technical lead with broad influence across Engineering, Product, Platform, and Compliance. You will partner deeply with the teams building our web and mobile applications, backend services, system integrations, card and banking workflows, infrastructure as code, and data platforms to turn risk reduction into scalable guardrails, automated controls, and clear engineering guidance. You are a builder and security partner at heart - someone who can set direction and mature security capabilities. You know when to introduce strong standards, when to ship incremental improvements, and how to make secure paths the easiest paths for engineers without turning security into a centralized approval queue.

Requirements

7+ years in security engineering, application security, cloud security, product security, platform security, or closely related technical security roles, ideally in a high-growth SaaS or technology company.
Proven ability to lead broad security engineering initiatives as a senior IC, influence cross-functional technical decisions, and move work from strategy to production implementation.
Strong working knowledge of secure SDLC practices, secure design review, threat modeling, API security, code scanning, SAST, CI/CD security integrations, security testing, defect management, and vulnerability remediation workflows.
Hands-on experience with AWS-native security patterns and services, including IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, VPC segmentation, WAF, Secrets Manager, S3/RDS encryption, infrastructure-as-code security, container orchestration security, and cloud posture management.
Ability to guide secure system builds involving access control, encryption standards, key and certificate management, vaulting, secrets management, and managed HSM/KMS-backed cryptographic services.
Experience hardening build, test, and deployment workflows through dependency scanning, SBOMs, artifact signing, secret scanning, CI/CD guardrails, least-privilege automation, and container security controls.
Ability to use frameworks such as NIST CSF 2.0 and OWASP SAMM pragmatically to assess current state, sequence improvements, define metrics, and mature security practices iteratively.
Clear communicator who can partner with engineering, product, platform, compliance, and business teams; write practical guidance; teach developers; and create durable security champions programs.
Strong judgment in prioritizing technical risk reduction, managing ambiguity, documenting decisions, and building lightweight processes that scale with the company.

Nice To Haves

Operated as a senior IC or technical lead for security engineering work, setting strategy while staying hands-on with design reviews, code, automation, tooling, and operational follow-through.
Deep experience with secure SDLC practices, shift-left security, threat modeling, API security, SAST/code scanning, CI/CD security integrations, security QA, vulnerability management, and developer-friendly security UX.
Comfortable partnering with Platform Engineering on IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, VPC and network segmentation, WAF, Secrets Manager, RDS, S3, infrastructure-as-code security, container security, and continuous cloud posture management.
Able to reason about access control, encryption standards, certificate management, vaulting, key management, HSM/KMS-backed cryptography, secure system builds, DDoS/WAF/network design, and detection engineering in a modern SaaS environment.
Experienced improving dependency management, SBOM generation, artifact signing, secret scanning, third-party risk input, CI/CD hardening, and the security of build and release pipelines.
Familiar with NIST CSF 2.0 as a practical maturity framework and able to use OWASP SAMM to shape application security and engineering maturity.
Treat security as an engineering enablement function, building scalable guardrails, paved roads, documentation, training, security champions, and feedback loops that help teams move faster with less risk.
Experience securing fintech, benefits, payroll, payments, or other regulated SaaS platforms that process PII, financial data, HRIS data, transaction data, or customer administrative workflows.
Familiarity with SOC 2, HITRUST, PCI, or similar compliance and audit programs, with the ability to support evidence and control design while staying focused on technical risk reduction.
Experience with AWS serverless and managed-service architectures, including API Gateway, Cognito, Lambda, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, Transfer Family, CloudFront, and event-driven security monitoring patterns.
Background with mobile application security for iOS and Android, including secure token handling, platform keychain/keystore patterns, OTA update risk, and mobile API abuse prevention.
Experience with detection-as-code, SIEM/SOAR workflows, security data pipelines, incident response automation, or measurable improvements to alert quality and response readiness.
Hands-on experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, policy-as-code, CSPM/CWPP tools, container image scanning, runtime security, or Kubernetes/ECS hardening.
Experience designing developer education, secure coding workshops, security champions programs, or other scalable practices that improve security outcomes without slowing delivery.
Experience defining practical governance for LLMs, AI coding assistants, prompt/data handling, model/tool approval, and sensitive data protection in AI-enabled software development workflows.

Responsibilities

Build, operationalize, and scale security engineering practices.
Protect the benefits platform and sensitive employee, benefits, and financial data.
Work across application security, cloud security, security architecture, supply chain security, detection engineering, and vulnerability management.
Balance security depth with speed and pragmatism.
Act as a senior individual contributor and technical lead with broad influence across Engineering, Product, Platform, and Compliance.
Partner with teams building web and mobile applications, backend services, system integrations, card and banking workflows, infrastructure as code, and data platforms.
Turn risk reduction into scalable guardrails, automated controls, and clear engineering guidance.
Set direction and mature security capabilities.
Introduce strong standards and ship incremental improvements.
Make secure paths the easiest paths for engineers.
Define secure AI tooling usage, LLM and code-assistant governance, and data protection practices for AI-enabled development workflows.
Balance ideal security outcomes with engineering velocity and business priorities.
Make clear tradeoffs and prioritize risks for a growing startup.