Security Engineer, Kubernetes

xAI•Austin, NY

About The Position

SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence and the full Super Intelligence stack, including compute infrastructure, models, and applications. The Security Engineer, Kubernetes will protect the platform that runs X and SpaceXSI by identifying real risks and exploits in Kubernetes environments and turning them into durable fixes and tooling. The role focuses on securing the platform behind the companies’ infrastructure, products, and workloads, with an emphasis on pod and platform security, attacker-minded risk assessment, and defenses that work at scale. The role values practical controls and tooling over policy documents, least privilege and defense-in-depth across the fleet, actionable findings, and safe, constrained security validation that does not put production at risk. The position is open to working from one of the company’s offices in Palo Alto, Austin, DC, or New York.

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience in platform security, Kubernetes security, or offensive security against production infrastructure.
Deep knowledge of pod and workload security, including privileged containers, capabilities, host namespaces, host path mounts, service accounts, RBAC, admission control, and network isolation.
Working knowledge of identity, secrets, workload identity, service-to-service trust, supply chain, runtime security, and cloud access.
Ability to think like an attacker, measure blast radius, and turn attack paths into detections, controls, or tools.
Comfort with operators, custom resources, Helm, and GitOps workflows.
Ability to build or modify security tooling in Go, Python, or Rust when automation is needed.
Open to working from one of the offices in Palo Alto, Austin, DC, or New York.

Nice To Haves

Image scanning, SBOMs, secure base images, policy-as-code (Kyverno or OPA), multi-cluster environments, runtime detection, or security testing of customer-facing applications.
Experience developing AI-driven security tools or integrating AI into security workflows.
Familiarity with Kubernetes-based environments and securing cloud-native infrastructure.
Proven ability to drive technical decisions and influence security practices across teams.
Passion for challenging the status quo and building transformative security solutions.
Strong collaboration skills and experience working in dynamic, cross-functional teams.
A sense of humor and adaptability in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment.

Responsibilities

Secure the platform end to end, including nodes, clusters, pods, roles, tokens, secrets, service-to-service communication, and the software supply chain.
Find and remediate overprivileged permissions, dangerous pod and workload settings, and escalation paths involving operators, admission, networking, identity, and monitoring.
Assess the platform from an adversary’s perspective, including container and pod breakout, privilege escalation, and movement across workloads, using safe, constrained validation; fix identified issues.
Design and build security tooling and automation, including AI-assisted analysis, to catch risky configuration and overprivilege before or after deployment.
Strengthen identity and secrets handling so workloads receive only the access they need.
Improve supply-chain security through secure base images, continuous scanning, and related controls.
Review changes affecting RBAC, operators, ServiceAccounts, network policies, and workloads running with elevated privileges.
Partner with platform and product teams as a security owner, taking problems from identification through rollout.
Contribute to fleet-wide hardening, policy enforcement, and safer defaults.