Senior Security Engineer

Nova Intelligence•United States, CA

About The Position

Nova Intelligence is building the most powerful AI platform for SAP teams. SAP is the heart of the enterprise: almost every critical business process at the world's largest companies — finance, supply chain, manufacturing, sales — runs on SAP. Our customers use Nova to 3x the productivity of their SAP teams: modernizing legacy code, redesigning business processes, resolving production issues, and more. Nova Intelligence was founded by AI researchers, repeat entrepreneurs, and the co-inventor of SAP HANA, and has raised $40M from SAP.io , Accel, Conviction, and Chemistry. Check out the Launch Video

Requirements

Deep, hands-on security experience — application security, cloud security (AWS in particular), identity and access management, and the architectural intuition to spot a privilege escalation path two systems away.
Think adversarially by default, whether your background is offensive (red team, pentest, vulnerability research) or defensive engineering at a place that took it seriously.
Informed opinions on AI security: prompt injection, agent action boundaries, tool-use vulnerabilities, sandbox escape, and what changes when agents have persistent infrastructure access.
Fluent in the compliance frameworks customers care about (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA) — not as the goal, but as a baseline you can drive efficiently before building well past it.
Communicate clearly with both engineers and executives. Half this job is making security real with platform engineers; the other half is being credible to a CISO who needs to defend our platform internally.
Track record of public technical output — writing, talks, CVEs, open-source contributions. (Strong plus, not required.)
5+ years of security engineering, security architecture, or offensive security work
Hands-on AWS security depth (IAM, KMS, networking, multi-account architectures)
Designing or hardening multi-tenant SaaS platforms in enterprise contexts
Leading SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, or comparable certification efforts
Familiarity with SAP, ABAP, or enterprise application security generally
Working directly with enterprise customer security teams (CISOs, DPOs, security architects)

Nice To Haves

Track record of public technical output — writing, talks, CVEs, open-source contributions.

Responsibilities

Own platform security architecture. You'll harden the security model of the platform across cloud and (in the future) on-prem deployments — isolation between customers and environments, identity and access policy, secrets and key management, and network controls.
You'll work on real problems like preventing cross-service privilege paths, evolving customer-side audit access, maintaining tight scoping of admin credentials, and ensuring the agent's execution sandboxes can run untrusted code safely.
Lead our internal red team. You'll lead and extend our red team work — probing access controls and privilege boundaries, testing agent action boundaries (prompt injection, tool-use abuse, sandbox escape), validating tenant isolation under realistic attack patterns, and stress-testing our auth flows under adversarial pressure.
Solve hard auth and identity problems in SAP. SAP's identity model is idiosyncratic and the customer landscape is complex: federated SSO via IAS or other IdPs, SAML and OAuth flows across multiple systems, RFC connections, technical users, and a long tail of legacy auth patterns. You'll own how identity propagates from the customer's IdP through Nova into their SAP systems.
Raise our internal security baseline. SSO, deployment pipelines, secrets in CI/CD, code review controls, vendor onboarding, internal access. You'll set the standards, drive the implementation, and lead Nova's adherence to the compliance frameworks customers expect (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA). We treat these as the floor, not the ceiling.
Partner with customer security teams. Our enterprise customers run some of the most sophisticated security organizations in the world. You'll be the technical voice in the room with their CISOs, security architects, and DPOs — translating their requirements into platform changes and Nova's design into language their teams can defend internally.
Push the frontier on offensive and defensive AI for SAP. AI agents are uniquely powerful for security work in SAP — finding vulnerabilities in custom ABAP, auditing access patterns, identifying privilege escalation paths in customer landscapes. We use Nova to help customers find weaknesses in their own systems, and we use Nova to study Nova. You'll lead this research and shape it into product.
Represent Nova on security in the SAP community. Write, speak, publish. Security at the AI-meets-SAP intersection is uncharted territory, and there's real work to do in defining the field.