Principal / Staff Application Security Engineer

About AiDASH AiDASH is an enterprise AI company and the leading provider of vegetation risk intelligence for electric utilities. Powered by proprietary VegetationAI™ technology, AiDASH delivers a unified remote grid inspection and monitoring platform that uses a SatelliteFirst approach to identify and address vegetation and other threats to the grid. With a prevention-first strategy to mitigate wildfire risk and minimize storm impacts, AiDASH helps more than 140 utilities reduce costs, improve reliability, and lower liability across their networks. AiDASH exists to safeguard critical utility infrastructure and secure the future of humanAIty™. Learn more at www.aidash.com. We are a Series C growth company backed by leading investors, including Shell Ventures, National Grid Partners, G2 Venture Partners, Duke Energy, Edison International, Lightrock, Marubeni, among others. We have been recognized by Forbes two years in a row as one of “America’s Best Startup Employers.” We are also proud to be one of the few software companies in Time Magazine’s “America’s Top GreenTech Companies 2024”. Deloitte Technology Fast 500 ™ recently ranked us at No. 12 among San Francisco Bay Area companies, and No. 59 overall in their selection of the top 500 for 2024. Join us in Securing Tomorrow! The Role AiDASH protects the critical infrastructure that delivers power to tens of millions of people. We are SOC 2 Type II certified today, and we're working toward ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certifications in 2027. As we embed GenAI more deeply into our SaaS products (RAG pipelines, agentic / MCP services) and roll out AI-assisted development internally, the threat landscape is shifting fast. Autonomous adversaries, Mythos-class threat actors, prompt injection, model exfiltration, and vibe-coded internal apps spun up by non-engineers are now part of the daily attack surface. We're hiring a Principal or Staff Security Engineer to be our deepest technical voice on security — covering DevSecOps, AI/LLM security, cloud and endpoint defense, IT-Security, and the governance work that will land us ISO 27001 and 42001 certifications in 2027. You'll architect the strategy, pick the right tools where gaps exist, run the audits, and grow the function. You will report to senior leadership and partner with platform, ML, DevOps, and IT leadership across the company. If you've been waiting for a chance to lead the security program at a Series C AI company that ships production AI to critical infrastructure operators, this is that role. The Team You'll partner with our existing security and compliance team based in India — a security engineer plus two compliance specialists, currently within the DevOps organization — and serve as the most senior security IC at AiDASH and the company's authority on AI/LLM security. This role represents the next phase of our security investment: bringing senior-IC depth, AI-native security leadership, and modern detection engineering to a program that has so far been operated alongside DevOps. How you'll make an impact: DevSecOps & AppSec Operate and mature our AppSec toolchain across CI/CD — SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets scanning, and IaC policy-as-code. Deepen coverage and evaluate additional tooling where gaps are real Run threat modeling and secure-design reviews; champion shift-left so security is part of every PR, not a gate at the end Operate the AIBOM / SBOM toolchain; enforce risk-tiered dependency controls and extend SLSA practices to model artifacts AI & LLM Security Harden production GenAI deployments on AWS (managed model APIs, agentic / MCP services) — IAM, VPC routing, prompt-layer guardrails, output filtering, rate/cost controls Codify OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS controls into the SDLC; introduce LLM eval-as-gate in CI Govern internal AI-assisted developer tooling — DLP for what egresses to external model providers, sensitive-data discovery in prompts, and acceptable-use telemetry Stand up controls for vibe-coded apps and shadow AI: discover, classify, gate with sane defaults, and bring under the SDLC ISO 27001 / 42001 & Security Governance Lead the company's path to ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 (AI Management System) certifications in 2027 — scope the management systems, run gap assessments, build the control sets, and steer the audit cycles Maintain our SOC 2 Type II posture; manage the evidence pipeline, control mappings, and external auditor relationships Maintain alignment with the NIST AI RMF and translate emerging AI regulation (EU AI Act, US state AI laws, utility-sector mandates) into concrete engineering requirements Cloud, Endpoint & IT-Security Operate our endpoint, cloud, identity, and SIEM platforms end-to-end. Own detection engineering, tuning, and integration with the rest of the stack Harden AWS posture across accounts (Organizations, SCPs, Control Tower); mature Kubernetes security (admission controllers, runtime visibility, pragmatic hardening) Stand up zero-trust privileged access — short-lived, audited sessions for production infra, databases, and Kubernetes Lead IT-Security: device posture, identity (SSO, MFA, SCIM), network segmentation, SaaS posture, and offboarding hygiene Detection, Response & Resilience Build and tune detections in our SIEM; own the on-call rotation, runbooks, and IR retainer relationships Run tabletop exercises across Eng, Legal, and Exec; lead post-incident reviews with blameless write-ups Translate AI threat research — prompt injection, data poisoning, model inversion, agent hijacking — into detections and controls that ship with every release What we're looking for: Minimum qualifications 10+ years in security engineering, with 3+ years owning a DevSecOps or platform-security program in a cloud-native environment (AWS strongly preferred) AppSec depth: shipped and operated SAST/DAST/SCA (e.g., Codacy, Semgrep, CodeQL, Snyk, Veracode, or equivalents) at production scale AI security: hands-on hardening of a production LLM deployment (AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI, or equivalent) — IAM, VPC routing, guardrails, eval gating. RAG-demo experience alone does not meet the bar EDR/XDR + cloud security platform operator: production experience administering CrowdStrike Falcon (Insight/XDR, Cloud Security CNAPP/CSPM, Identity Protection, or Next-Gen SIEM), SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender XDR, or equivalent, including custom detection authoring Zero-trust access: experience standing up or operating a privileged-access broker (e.g., Teleport, StrongDM, BeyondTrust, CyberArk, HashiCorp Boundary) SBOM/AIBOM tooling: operated Interlynk, Anchore, Dependency-Track, or equivalent at production scale Vulnerability management: production experience with Trivy, Aqua, Wiz, Orca, Lacework, or equivalent across containers, IaC, and SCA IaC & policy-as-code: Terraform plus production policy-as-code (OPA/Rego, Checkov, Kyverno, tfsec, or equivalent) in a live pipeline Container & Kubernetes security: production experience with admission controllers (Kyverno, Gatekeeper), runtime visibility (Falco or equivalent), and pragmatic Kubernetes hardening (gVisor, Kata where it earns its keep) DLP experience: real-world sensitive-data discovery across SaaS or developer tooling, including AI-assisted environments Compliance fluency: has personally driven SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 controls to audit, and can read a control map without flinching. Bay Area based; able to work hybrid (3 days/week in office) Preferred qualifications Hands-on MCP work — design, hardening, or auth — even early-stage ISO 42001 implementation experience; ISO/IEC 42001 Lead Implementer or Lead Auditor certification, or comparable AI-governance leadership Familiarity with NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act's high-risk system requirements Prompt-layer DLP and AI runtime guardrails (e.g., Nightfall, Lakera Guard, Cyberhaven, Harmonic Security, Protect AI, NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails) LLM eval-as-gate in CI (e.g., Promptfoo, Garak, DeepEval, Giskard) and AI red-teaming experience Modern PAM / zero-trust rollouts (Teleport, StrongDM) and SaaS posture management (e.g., AppOmni, Obsidian) Experience securing SaaS products sold into regulated sectors (utilities, energy, financial services, healthcare) Public signals: conference talks (fwd:cloudsec, DEF CON AI Village, BSides) or open-source contributions in CI/CD, MCP, or LLM-deployment security Leadership of incident response for a material security event Comfort working with remote, distributed engineering teams across US/India time zones What you'll love: Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage: 100% coverage for employees and 80% for their spouses and children Health Reimbursement Account (HRA): 100% funded by AiDASH to cover medical deductibles 401(k) Plan: Begin contributing after three months of employment to prepare for your future. Currently, no company match is offered Parental Leave: Supportive parental leave with 16 weeks for primary caregivers and 4 weeks for secondary caregivers Generous Vacation Policy: Accrue 20 vacation days per year, plus enjoy an additional flex holiday to celebrate whatever feels most important to you! Winter Break: From December 25th through January 1st, we give everyone time off to recharge and enjoy time with family and friends! We are proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We are committed to embracing diversity and inclusion in our hiring practices, and we promote a work environment where everyone, from any race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin, can do their best work. We offer a competitive base pay range for this full-time position, which is between $210 ,000 and $ 270 ,000 per year. This range reflects t he anticipa ted base salary for new hires. In addition, this role is also eligible for an annual performance bonus and equity. We strive to ensure our compensation packages a re equita ble and aligned with industry standards. Your recruiter can share more about compensation during the hiring process. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible interview experience for all candidates. Please let us know if you require any accommodation during the interview process, and we will make every effort to meet your needs. Read our Privacy Policy here: https://www.aidash.com/policy/privacy-policy/