Staff Security Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote within the United States; applicants outside the US will not be considered.

Salary: $56–$77 USD per hour.

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that designs and ships AI co-workers and cloud applications for enterprise clients across multiple industries.

What you will do

• Define security architecture and engineering standards for web, API, cloud-native, and AI systems.
• Lead threat modeling, security design reviews, penetration testing, vulnerability management, and secure code reviews.
• Architect identity, network, data, secrets management, encryption, and other cloud security controls.
• Integrate security automation, shift-left detection, and policy-as-code into CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead detection engineering, logging, and incident response across production systems.
• Secure AI and LLM applications against prompt injection, data leakage, model abuse, and agentic-AI threats while integrating LLM APIs and agent workflows into security operations.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional security or software engineering experience, including at least 3 years leading application and cloud security initiatives.
• Deep expertise in application security, secure coding, the OWASP Top 10, cloud security, and security automation.
• Strong experience with threat modeling, penetration testing, vulnerability management, secure code review, detection engineering, logging, and incident response.
• Experience securing AI and LLM-powered applications, including prompt injection, data leakage, model abuse, and agentic-AI threats.
• Experience with security, compliance, and governance frameworks, plus technical mentoring and leadership.
• Demonstrable daily use and expert knowledge of AI-forward tools such as Claude and Cursor.

Nice to have

• Experience balancing reliability, cost, safety, and long-term implications in ambiguous, high-stakes technical work.
• Experience translating complex security risks and tradeoffs for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work for employees based in the United States.
• Work with cross-functional engineering, product, data, leadership, and client teams.
• Paid time off and medical, dental, and vision insurance for eligible employees.
• 401(k) benefits for eligible employees.
• Production-focused environment with experienced teams averaging more than 15 years of experience.