Security Lead, Product and Infrastructure (InfoSec)

River AI•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

River AI is seeking its first security hire to build and lead security from the ground up. The Security Lead will protect the company’s research infrastructure, model weights, corporate assets, and customer-facing platform while enabling rapid frontier AI development. The role combines hands-on engineering leadership, security program development, and strategic direction. The position will establish capabilities across cybersecurity, detection and response, product security, and operational security. It will also oversee corporate IT, identity and access management, privacy engineering, security research and tooling, and the compliance roadmap. The role serves as an external security representative to enterprise customers, regulators, board members, and government partners, and will recruit and mentor a high-performing security team. The position is located in Palo Alto, California. Expected base compensation is $200,000–$420,000 per year, depending on experience and skills, plus equity. River AI offers comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance, unlimited PTO, relocation assistance as needed, and visa sponsorship for the right candidate.

Requirements

10+ years of security experience, with significant experience at a technology company; AI experience is preferred.
Proven track record as a first or early security executive in a high-velocity, high-stakes environment, balancing strategic leadership with hands-on involvement in tooling, architecture, and incident command.
Deep expertise in at least two of the following: detection engineering, incident response, digital forensics, infrastructure security, product/application security, operational security, or secure software development.
Direct experience securing cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems, container or VM environments, and high-performance compute clusters.
Demonstrated ability to build and ship security tooling or research projects, such as internal platforms, open-source tools, or commercial security products.
Ability to communicate technical risk to executives, partner with research leads on novel threat models, and review code or architecture.
Intellectual curiosity about AI safety, alignment, and the security challenges of AI model and AI agent development.

Nice To Haves

Experience with model-weight protection, secure multi-party compute, confidential computing, or supply-chain security at an AI lab or research organization.
Published research, conference talks, or open-source contributions in security engineering or defensive operations.
Experience with startups or venture-backed companies.

Responsibilities

Build the security function from first principles and architect and scale end-to-end security operations across product and infrastructure security, detection engineering, incident response, GRC, and workplace security.
Protect proprietary model weights, training data pipelines, research clusters, and source code from sophisticated adversaries.
Design lightweight, automated security controls and secure-by-default infrastructure that support safe developer experimentation without bureaucratic workflows.
Integrate security, IT, and privacy engineering; own corporate IT, identity and access management, and privacy engineering.
Explore and develop security research and tooling, including applications of AI to vulnerability discovery, code analysis, and defensive operations.
Improve the security of River AI’s products.
Represent security externally to enterprise customers, regulators, board members, and government partners.
Lead the compliance roadmap, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP.
Recruit and mentor security engineers, operators, and researchers; automate repetitive work and embed security into the software development lifecycle.