Software Engineer (AI Security)

Location: On-site in San Francisco, California, United States

Annual salary: $300,000–$350,000 USD

Company

Thinking Machines Lab builds frontier AI models, tools for customizing models, and interfaces for human-AI communication.

What you will do

• Partner with product and research teams on threat modeling, design reviews, secure defaults, and security throughout the development lifecycle.
• Design and implement authentication, authorization, session management, input validation, data protection, and other security controls.
• Build and maintain secure frameworks, templates, CI/CD checks, dependency management, and vulnerability-detection tooling for engineers.
• Collaborate with researchers to identify and mitigate AI-specific risks, including model abuse, prompt injection, data leakage, and capability misuse.
• Improve observability and detection for access anomalies, abuse patterns, and suspicious production behavior.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, engineering, or a similar field.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language: Python or Rust.
• Strong generalist software engineering background and ability to review production code for security risks.
• Hands-on experience securing web applications and APIs, especially authentication flows, access control, secrets management, input validation, and data protection.
• Familiarity with common vulnerability classes and prevention frameworks, plus experience hardening prototypes for production.
• Comfort with modern cloud infrastructure and understanding of how application concerns intersect with infrastructure.
• Ability to operate across the stack and own projects end-to-end.
• Ability to collaborate with cross-functional partners and subject matter experts, take initiative, and work across different stacks and teams to ship improvements.

Nice to have

• Experience securing AI-powered products or working with ML/LLM APIs and their unique threat models.
• Background in human-computer interaction, especially where security or trust is central to the user experience.
• Strong rapid-prototyping and iteration skills, including turning ad-hoc fixes into reusable patterns and tools.
• Open-source security work, bug bounty write-ups, or published tooling.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work with product, research, and other cross-functional teams.
• Visa sponsorship is available, with support through the visa process when applicable.
• Relocation support is available as needed.
• Health, dental, and vision benefits, unlimited PTO, and paid parental leave.