Staff Security Engineer

Forward Financing • Boston, MA

12d • $160,000 - $200,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Forward Financing is a financial technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts with team members throughout the United States, Dominican Republic, and Canada. The company is on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. Recognized as a Best Place to Work by Built In Boston and certified as a Great Place To Work®, Forward is investing in its employees, technology, and customer experience – with long-term success in mind every step of the way.
As a Staff Security Engineer, you’ll own the technical architecture of Forward’s security program at a pivotal moment in our growth. Rather than running a single tool or living inside one team, you’ll be the connective technical layer across our Application Security (AppSec), Security Operations (SecOps), and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) functions – making sure our security technology works together, scales, and fits naturally into how the rest of the company builds and operates. Reporting directly to the Head of Security, you’ll set the technical direction for how we design, evaluate, and integrate security platforms, and you’ll mentor engineers across all three functions along the way.

Requirements

• Typically 7 or more years in security engineering, security architecture, detection engineering, or security operations, including designing systems that span multiple security domains.
• Demonstrated experience owning or heavily shaping the architecture of a security technology stack – how platforms, data, and controls fit together – not just operating a single tool.
• Deep, hands-on cloud security expertise (AWS required; GCP or Azure a plus), including control plane monitoring, IAM, network architecture, and infrastructure log analysis.
• A track record of integrating security tooling and controls into broader Engineering and IT ecosystems (CI/CD, identity, endpoints, and SaaS).
• Fluency across at least two of the three domains this role serves – AppSec, SecOps, and GRC – with enough literacy in the third to design for it.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and/or detection-as-code (e.g., Terraform and CI/CD pipelines for security configurations and detection logic).
• Working knowledge of security frameworks such as CIS Controls, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and NIST, and how architecture maps to control and audit requirements.
• Experience with modern programming languages such as Ruby, Python, or Go, sufficient to build automation and integrations.
• Ability to communicate risk and technical direction crisply to engineers and executives alike.
• Typically has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Physics, or an equivalent technical degree, or equivalent industry experience.

Nice To Haves

• Prior DevOps or software engineering experience.
• Experience securing containerized and microservices workloads deployed in production on orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience managing multiple AWS environments (VPCs, firewalls, IAM, GuardDuty, CloudTrail, WAF).
• A history of running proof-of-concept evaluations and leading tool consolidation efforts.
• Experience with SIEM and detection platforms such as Chronicle, Splunk, Panther, or open-source equivalents.
• A red-plus-blue-team mindset and familiarity with adversary TTPs (MITRE ATT&CK).
• Background in fintech or another regulated environment

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture of Forward’s security technology stack – the platforms, tooling, data pipelines, and integrations that power AppSec, SecOps, and GRC – and make sure it works cleanly with the broader Engineering, IT, and Infrastructure ecosystem.
• Set the technical direction for how we evaluate, integrate, standardize, and retire security tools, defining the reference architectures and standards the department builds on.
• Act as the shared technical foundation for all three security functions: helping developers build security testing into how software ships, giving the operations team clean and reliable data to detect and investigate threats, and giving the compliance team the evidence and reporting they need to prove that controls are working.
• Partner with Engineering, IT, and Infrastructure to build security into shared platforms – cloud (AWS), identity, CI/CD, endpoints, and SaaS – so security is native rather than bolted on.
• Lead the evaluation, proof-of-concept, and rollout of new security technologies; consolidate overlapping tools and reduce operational toil with defensible build-versus-buy recommendations.
• Use infrastructure-as-code and detection-as-code to make security configurations, platform hardening, and cloud-native controls automated, versioned, and repeatable.
• Architect our centralized logging and detection data foundation (SIEM and supporting pipelines) so a single high-quality data source serves detection, investigation, and audit needs.
• Architect the technical underpinnings of our identity governance and role-based access control programs, plus the automation that keeps access defensible as we grow.
• Keep the security architecture aligned to frameworks like CIS Controls, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and NIST, so it stays defensible and auditable.
• Provide senior technical support during major incidents, and turn lessons learned into lasting architectural improvements.
• Grow the bar for the whole department – mentoring and technically guiding engineers across AppSec, SecOps, and GRC on design quality, secure defaults, and engineering practices.

Benefits

• Flexibility is a top priority: Our employees are empowered to choose where they want to work (whether that’s from home, in the office, or a combination of both) with flexible hours.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior