Security Engineer

Traversal•New York, NY

20d•$240,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

Traversal is hiring a senior, high-impact Security Engineer to raise the company’s security floor by building AI-native security mechanisms suited to its products and engineering practices. The role partners with security leadership to shape the security roadmap across product, cloud, and infrastructure, and independently owns broad-scope projects that establish secure foundations for engineers and move the company toward automated verification of whether changes are safe to ship. The engineer will build security capabilities into Traversal’s products and cloud infrastructure to protect enterprise customers and their data. The work spans application behavior, identity, infrastructure, deployment boundaries, data security, and access controls across mission-critical enterprise environments, including multi-tenant and BYOC deployments and multiple compliance regimes. This role owns foundational security systems end to end and, as scope grows, sets technical direction across related work streams and builds capabilities adopted by other teams. Traversal is an AI Site Reliability Engineer for enterprise environments, built to diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents in complex production systems. Its team combines AI researchers and technical staff and operators, and the company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Hanabi, NFDG, and American Express Ventures. The position is full-time and in-person in New York, near Madison Square Park, five days per week.

Requirements

4–6+ years building or securing production software or infrastructure at technically rigorous companies or teams, including sensitive, mission-critical systems.
Ability to independently lead ambiguous, cross-team security projects from design through implementation, migration, and adoption, with minimal structure.
Strong programming skills in a language such as Python, Rust, or Go, and ability to work effectively in an existing codebase.
Hands-on depth in application security or cloud security, with working knowledge of the other, gained in a security role or through ownership of security-critical systems as a software or infrastructure engineer.
Technical depth in risk assessment; treats standards such as NIST and SOC 2 as a starting point, not necessarily the right baseline.
Practical understanding of authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, secrets, and common failure modes in distributed systems.
Clear written communication and a collaborative approach to technical disagreements.

Nice To Haves

Experience with enterprise customer security requirements.
Experience building on and securing infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform and container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes.
Detection engineering, security telemetry, or automated control validation experience.
Offensive testing experience paired with shipped remediations.
Experience applying formal methods for security.

Responsibilities

Design and ship libraries, defaults, and workflows that make secure development the easiest way to build at Traversal.
Define and implement controls that continuously verify security properties across products and cloud infrastructure.
Design and ship security capabilities in Traversal products for enterprise security teams.
Discover security issues, verify and assess them, ship fixes with system owners, and add tests or controls to prevent recurrence.
Architect security systems and major components, defining interfaces, invariants, and evolution paths that scale across SaaS and BYOC deployments.
Lead multi-phase rollouts, migrations, and deprecations across teams, sequencing and de-risking work and supporting adoption with enablement and measurable success criteria.
Deliver operationally complete systems with monitoring, alert quality, runbooks, and safe rollout and upgrade paths; debug and resolve security issues in the engineer’s area.
Set direction for scoped security domains, connect technical work to customer and business outcomes, and shape follow-up roadmaps with product and engineering leadership.
Mentor engineers and emerging technical leaders, and create patterns, libraries, and reference implementations that enable others to extend the work independently.