Staff Application Security Engineer

Aurora•Mountain View, CA

8d•$171,000 - $303,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurora is seeking a Staff Application Security Engineer with a strong software engineering background to help build and maintain an AI-native application security program for their driverless truck product and supporting infrastructure. This is a builder-first role for someone who enjoys understanding complex systems and working alongside engineers to improve them. The engineer will collaborate on fixes and design-level improvements, build automation, and make security a low-friction part of the software development lifecycle, using AI thoughtfully to scale attention while applying engineering judgment.

Requirements

Substantial experience building and maintaining production software, with strong programming, debugging, and system design skills.
Ability to investigate unfamiliar codebases, understand system behavior, and reason about potential misuse.
Experience delivering technical work across teams in a large or complex engineering organization.
Demonstrated ability to threat model systems, explain technical risks, and tradeoffs clearly and collaborate with engineers on practical solutions.
Experience building developer tooling, automation, or software development lifecycle integrations.
Practical experience using AI to support technical work, with the judgment to validate its output and explain the underlying reasoning.
Experience with languages in our stack: C, C++, Go, Python, JavaScript, and web frameworks.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience building or maintaining both cloud and embedded systems, ideally with deep technical knowledge of each.
Experience developing software for safety-critical products or their supporting infrastructure, particularly autonomous vehicle technology.
Application or product security experience, including in-depth code audits, secure design reviews, threat modeling, or vulnerability investigation.
Experience building and maintaining production AI-assisted security tooling or automation.

Responsibilities

Partner with engineering teams on fixes and secure design improvements, contributing code directly.
Investigate findings and their practical impact, bringing clear evidence and possible solutions when engaging the responsible teams.
Help build and maintain the application security program and its tooling, using AI to scale investigation while validating results.
Build automation and integrate preventative controls into the software development lifecycle to reduce recurring risks and friction.