Staff Security Engineer

The role

Staff Security Engineers lead the security of cloud applications and AI systems for clients. You will define security architecture across cloud infrastructure, application code, and AI/LLM workloads.

What you will do

• Define security architecture across cloud infrastructure, application code, and AI/LLM workloads
• Lead threat modeling and security reviews
• Write production Python and Terraform
• Turn compliance obligations into automated evidence
• Mentor junior engineers
• Partner with engineering and leadership to ensure secure and reliable systems
• Implement application security and secure engineering practices
• Design cloud security architecture including identity, network, and data layers
• Manage Kubernetes security at scale
• Embed security automation and policy-as-code into CI/CD pipelines

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of professional security or software engineering experience
• At least 3 years leading application and cloud security initiatives
• 4+ years in cloud platform engineering, cloud security engineering, or infrastructure production engineering
• Demonstrated leadership and technical mentoring experience
• Strong stakeholder communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Demonstrable, day-to-day usage and expert knowledge of AI-forward tools such as Claude and Cursor
• Excellent problem-solving skills and sound judgment
• Deep expertise in secure coding practices, the OWASP Top 10, vulnerability management, and secure code review
• Deep AWS IAM expertise including cross-account trust, permission boundaries, IAM Identity Center, policy evaluation, and Organizations with service control policies
• Kubernetes security including RBAC, admission control, Helm, and workload identity federation
• Production Python against cloud provider SDKs
• Terraform module design, state management, and drift

Nice to have

• Using AI within security workflows
• Securing AI training and inference infrastructure, including GPU clusters, at scale
• Cloud account lifecycle automation
• Working knowledge of GCP
• Detection engineering, logging, and incident response practices at scale
• Observability fundamentals
• Penetration testing
• Experience working in multi-vendor environments
• Policy-as-code tooling (Open Policy Agent/Rego, Kyverno, Cloud Custodian)
• Cloud security posture management tooling (Wiz, Prisma Cloud, Orca, Prowler)

Benefits

• paid time off
• medical/dental/vision insurance
• 401(k)

Before you apply

• Applicants outside of the US and Canada will not be considered
• An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check

About the company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building the next frontier of business architecture. They design and ship AI co-workers that integrate into enterprise operations.