Security Engineer

Poetic•San Francisco, CA

51d•$200,000 - $315,000•Onsite

About The Position

Poetic is creating the next layer of human-computer interaction, combining AI intelligence with software reliability. They automate complex manual processes for large enterprises using a new English programming language that blends structured control flow with natural language instructions. Poetic's runtime executes complex AI workflows against sensitive enterprise data, including financial records, insurance claims, and telecom operations, across distributed environments spanning their cloud and customer infrastructure. The security surface is broad and includes multi-tenant isolation, data pipelines touching regulated industries, cross-VPC deployment topologies, large-scale LLM code generation monitoring, and an auditable runtime.

Requirements

An engineering background – you were a software engineer first and know your way around security.
You build things, not just advise on them.
4+ years of experience spanning product security and other areas.
Hands-on experience with compliance programs (SOC 2, PCI, or similar) in a fast-moving environment.
A builder’s orientation toward security tooling – you’d rather write the tool that prevents the mistake than write the policy that forbids it.
The soft skills to be a trusted security partner across the company: telling people no with a path forward, finding alternatives that work, and building credibility through helpfulness rather than gatekeeping.
Comfort operating as a generalist across product security, corporate security, and security tooling.

Nice To Haves

Experience securing systems that handle sensitive data in regulated verticals – banking, insurance, fintech, healthcare.
Familiarity with the security challenges of multi-tenant AI systems: prompt injection, data isolation, output validation, or the broader trust surface of LLM-powered products.
Experience with infrastructure security in distributed environments – container orchestration, cross-VPC networking, secrets management at scale, or securing customer-deployed runtimes.
Familiarity with managing outsourced IT or vendor relationships.
Experience at an early-stage startup where you built security programs from scratch rather than inheriting them.

Responsibilities

Lead product security: threat modeling, secure code review, vulnerability management, and building security into the development lifecycle.
Build internal security tooling that makes secure-by-default behavior the path of least resistance for the engineering team.
Harden the infrastructure that underpins Poetic’s runtime – from multi-tenant isolation and secrets management to network boundaries and data handling pipelines.
Communicate with customer security teams to ensure and communicate Poetic's security posture and architecture.
Be the internal voice on security: help the team understand tradeoffs, find paths that satisfy both security and velocity, and communicate clearly with stakeholders.
Work closely with external IT and Security partners, ensuring smooth day-to-day operations and appropriate controls.
Own day-to-day compliance programs – including SOC 2 and PCI – as the internal DRI, working closely with external compliance and audit partners.