Security Engineer, Kubernetes

Location: Palo Alto, CA; Austin, TX; New York, NY; Washington, DC. Open to working out of one of the listed offices.

Salary: $100,000–$258,000 USD per year.

Company

xAI is building a full super-intelligence stack spanning Colossus supercomputers, Grok models, and applications including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X.

What you will do

• Secure Kubernetes nodes, clusters, pods, roles, tokens, secrets, service-to-service communication, and the software supply chain.
• Identify and remediate overprivileged permissions, dangerous workload settings, escalation paths, and weaknesses in operators, admission, networking, identity, and monitoring.
• Assess the platform using safe, constrained adversarial validation, including container and pod breakout, privilege escalation, and movement across workloads.
• Design and build security tooling and automation, including AI-assisted analysis for risky configuration and overprivilege detection.
• Strengthen workload identity, secrets handling, secure base images, continuous scanning, policy enforcement, and safer defaults.
• Review security-sensitive platform changes and partner with platform and product teams from issue identification through rollout.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in platform security, Kubernetes security, or offensive security against production infrastructure.
• Deep knowledge of pod and workload security, including privileged containers, capabilities, host namespaces, host path mounts, ServiceAccounts, RBAC, admission control, and network isolation.
• Working knowledge of identity, secrets, workload identity, service-to-service trust, software supply chain, runtime security, and cloud access.
• Ability to think like an attacker, measure blast radius, and turn attack paths into detections, controls, or tools.
• Experience with operators, custom resources, Helm, and GitOps workflows.
• Ability to build or modify security tooling in Go, Python, or Rust when automation is required.
• Ability to drive technical decisions and influence security practices across teams.
• Strong collaboration skills and experience working in dynamic, cross-functional teams.
• Open to working from the Palo Alto, Austin, Washington, DC, or New York office.

Nice to have

• Experience with image scanning, SBOMs, secure base images, policy-as-code such as Kyverno or OPA, multi-cluster environments, runtime detection, and security testing of customer-facing applications.
• Experience developing AI-driven security tools or integrating AI into security workflows.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-based environments and securing cloud-native infrastructure.
• Passion for challenging the status quo and building transformative security solutions.
• A sense of humor and adaptability in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with platform and product teams in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment.
• Equity and comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k) retirement plan, short- and long-term disability insurance, and life insurance.
• Additional discounts and perks.