We are looking for a Senior Application Security Engineer to help secure our AI, machine learning, and inference platforms. This is a hands on technical role focused on building security into modern AI infrastructure, inference systems, and developer platforms. You will work closely with platform engineers, ML engineers, and infrastructure teams to identify risks, design secure architectures, and build security tooling that enables engineers to move quickly and safely. This role is execution focused. You will drive technical implementation, perform deep security reviews, and help build out our application security capabilities alongside the CISO and engineering leadership. This role can be based out of one of our office hubs (San Francisco or Seattle) with in-office requirements of at least 2 days per week, plus occasional team/company offsites. We are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this position at this time. ##
What You’ll Do
Secure AI and Machine Learning Systems
Perform threat modeling across AI platforms, inference services, and ML pipelines
Identify risks such as prompt injection, model extraction, adversarial inputs, and data leakage
Review model serving architectures and inference pipelines
Partner with ML engineers to secure training, fine tuning, and deployment workflows
Help design isolation and security controls for multi tenant AI workloads
Application Security Engineering
Perform architecture and design security reviews
Conduct targeted code reviews for high risk components
Identify security gaps in APIs, micro-services, and distributed systems
Build secure patterns for authentication, authorization, and service to service communication
Help engineering teams implement secure defaults and guardrails
Inference Platform Security
Secure customer facing inference APIs and services
Protect against abuse, model extraction, and adversarial behavior
Design rate limiting, isolation, and workload protection controls
Build monitoring and detection for anomalous inference behavior
AI Supply Chain and Model Security
Evaluate open source models and dependencies
Secure model artifacts and distribution pipelines
Implement integrity validation and provenance controls
Help secure container images and runtime environments
Security Automation and Tooling
Build security automation for AI and application pipelines
Integrate security scanning into CI/CD workflows
Develop tooling to help engineers detect and fix issues early
Improve developer experience with security guardrails
What You'll Need
Required Experience
Strong background in application security engineering
Experience performing threat modeling and architecture reviews
Experience securing APIs and distributed systems
Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
Experience with containers and Kubernetes
Strong scripting or programming skills such as Python, Go, or similar
Experience working closely with engineering teams to implement security improvements
AI and Machine Learning Experience
Experience securing ML pipelines, inference systems, or data platforms
Familiarity with risks such as prompt injection, model extraction, and adversarial inputs
Experience reviewing model serving architectures
Understanding of training data security and data leakage risks
It's a Strong Plus If You Have
Red team or offensive security experience
Experience crafting payloads and evaluating CVEs for exploitability in diverse environments
Experience with GPU infrastructure or high performance computing
Experience with Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar frameworks
Experience with LLM systems, RAG pipelines, or agent frameworks
Experience building security automation pipelines
Experience securing multi tenant infrastructure
What Success Looks Like
Security is embedded into AI platform architecture early
Engineering teams ship quickly with secure defaults
Inference platforms are resilient against abuse and extraction
Model pipelines are secure and auditable
Security tooling scales with engineering growth
Why This Role Matters
This role sits at the intersection of application security, AI infrastructure, and developer platforms. You will help define how we secure modern AI systems while enabling engineers to move quickly and safely. You will work closely with engineering leadership and the CISO to build practical, scalable security capabilities that support rapid innovation in AI and machine learning. ## Compensation
We are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Final offers are based on factors such as experience, skills, geographic location, and role expectations. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a meaningful equity component, and comprehensive benefits. The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is:
$180,000—$220,000 USD
Benefits and Perks
We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support our employees’ health, well-being, and long-term success. Benefits may vary by location, team, and role. Benefits include:
Comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage (U.S.); Private medical and dental insurance (U.K.)
Retirement and financial wellness support (U.S.); Pension contribution (U.K.)
Generous paid time off, plus holidays
Paid parental leave
Professional development support
Wellness and work-from-home stipends
Flexible work environment
At Lightning AI, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We believe that diverse teams drive innovation and create better products. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We are dedicated to building a culture where everyone can thrive and contribute to their fullest potential.
