Lead Security Engineer – Application Security & AI Security

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Lead Application Security initiatives across HighLevel’s products and engineering teams.
• Proliferate security standards recommended by central security team as best practices within Dev teams.
• Conduct architecture reviews, secure design assessments, and threat modeling for new features and platforms.
• Perform security assessments for Web, Mobile, and API-based applications.
• Define and drive secure SDLC practices across engineering teams.
• Partner with developers to identify, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities.
• Lead security reviews for AI/LLM-powered applications, agents, and AI integrations.
• Develop security guardrails for AI systems, including protections against prompt injection, data leakage, insecure tool usage, model abuse, and emerging AI attack techniques.
• Improve security tooling and automate security testing within CI/CD pipelines.
• Champion secure coding practices through developer enablement, documentation, and training.
• Drive vulnerability management efforts and improve remediation workflows.
• Mentor engineers and foster a strong security-first engineering culture.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration by communicating complex security risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders, influencing product roadmaps, and ensuring alignment between security priorities and engineering objectives.
• Stay current with emerging threats, application security trends, and advancements in AI security.

What You’ll Bring:

• 8+ years of experience in Cybersecurity, with deep expertise in Application Security and leading engineering-focused security initiatives.
• Comprehensive technical knowledge in securing Web, Mobile (Android/iOS), and API (REST/GraphQL) environments, including OWASP standards and authentication protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, SAML).
• Proven experience performing security assessments including threat modeling, secure design/code reviews, penetration testing, and architecture reviews.
• Hands-on DevSecOps proficiency: automating security in CI/CD pipelines, container security (Kubernetes/Docker), and managing security tooling (SAST, DAST, SCA, Secret Scanning).
• Specialized expertise in AI/LLM security, including mitigation of prompt injection, data leakage, model misuse, and insecure agent/tool integration.
• Proficiency in programming/scripting (Python, Go, JavaScript, or Bash) and strong communication skills to influence technical stakeholders across product and engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience securing workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code security (Terraform).
• Familiarity with CSPM/CNAPP solutions.
• Experience leading or participating in Red Teaming, adversary simulation, or purple team exercises.
• Experience with DevSecOps and security automation.
• Security certifications such as CEH, OSCP, GWAPT, CISSP, GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer, or similar.
• Contributions to open-source security projects, bug bounty programs, or security research.