Member of Technical Staff, Founding Security EngineerPace is the AI operations platform for insurance, trusted by some of the leading carriers, specialty mutual groups, and tech-forward brokers.
Almost $400bn per year is spent on outsourcing in financial services. We're here to change that, working side-by-side with some of the largest companies in the world.
RoleWe're looking for a Founding Security Engineer to help build the security function at Pace.
This is not a traditional security role. We want someone with strong security background and a customer-centric mindset: pragmatic, technical, close to the product, and focused on helping the company move quickly and safely to build trust with our customers.
You'll initially be a security generalist as we scale the product and team. You'll work across application and infrastructure security, enterprise security and GRC, incident response, and an emerging category we care deeply about: designing secure AI and agentic systems.
Some of the problems you might work on:
- Build security into our product. Partner directly with engineers on architecture, threat modeling, authentication and authorization, data isolation, secrets, secure development practices, and high-risk product features.
- Make agentic systems safe. Help us reason from first principles about the security boundaries of AI agents that can access sensitive data, use tools, interact with external systems, and take actions on behalf of customers.
- Own application security. Identify vulnerabilities before they become incidents, improve our testing and review processes, and help engineers develop strong security instincts rather than creating a security bottleneck.
- Scale our security program. Harden the systems, controls, policies, monitoring, incident response processes, and risk management practices that a company serving the world's largest financial institutions needs.
- Help own GRC and enterprise security. Work with customers, auditors, and the rest of the company on security reviews, compliance programs, questionnaires, controls, and evidence. We don't expect you to love paperwork or take on all this work independently, but you should work alongside our Head of Engineering and our third party partners to automate and ensure compliance.
- Raise the security bar across Pace. Security will remain a shared engineering responsibility. Your job is to become the person who makes the whole company better at continuously improving our security posture.
There won't always be a playbook. AI agents introduce security questions the industry is still learning how to answer, and Pace is operating them inside highly regulated, high-consequence environments. We want someone excited to help define what excellent security looks like here.
Who we're looking forWe care more about judgment, breadth, and adaptability. However, a great candidate will have some of the following:
- Significant experience as a security engineer, software engineer focused on security, or in another deeply technical security role.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals. You can read production code, write code yourself, reason about distributed systems, and work directly with engineers on architecture.
- Depth in at least one security discipline such as application security, cloud/infrastructure security, product security, identity, or detection and response.
- Experience securing modern cloud applications and understanding threats across the application, infrastructure, data, and identity layers.
- Strong instincts around threat modeling and designing systems that are secure by construction.
- Comfort operating in ambiguous environments where the security program is still being built.
- The ability to distinguish between theoretical risk and material risk, and to make pragmatic decisions without lowering the bar.
- Strong communication skills. You'll work with engineers, enterprise customers, auditors, and company leadership and need to translate between all of them.
Experience with AI/LLM security, SOC 2 or similar frameworks, regulated industries, enterprise security reviews, or building a security program from an early stage is valuable but not required.
We'd rather hire an exceptional security-minded engineer who is excited to learn an unfamiliar part of this surface area than someone whose experience fits neatly into one security specialization.
Team characteristicsThe Pace team has a couple of defining characteristics:
- Integrity: The most important thing is working with good people who want to have a massive impact on the world. Our team genuinely wants to do the best work of their careers and know it'll take 5-10 years of focus to deliver.
- Ambition: The ambition for this company is not just a good vertical AI business but a $100bn+ outcome across vertical services. We're looking for people that raise that level of ambition. Often this means they want to be the best at what they do, become leaders at scale, or one day start their own company. Pace will be the best place to learn, deliver impact, and advance your path to do something great.
TrajectoryThis person will have an unusual amount of ownership over what security becomes at Pace.
Today, that means being a broad security engineer and tackling the highest-leverage problem wherever it appears. As Pace grows, there are multiple potential paths:
Become a world-class IC with deep ownership of an area such as product security, application security, infrastructure security, or AI security
Build and lead the security engineering organization
Grow into broader security leadership across engineering, risk, and enterprise security
We want the person who joins now to have the opportunity to shape both the technical foundations of security at Pace and the team we eventually build around them.
Compensation & Benefits- Competitive base salary + meaningful early-stage equity
- Full medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Unlimited PTO
- In-person, New York City
At Pace, we're building a talent-dense team where teammates grow into leaders. This might mean growing into a world-class IC, owning a function, or leading teams. Whichever your path, we want to support you to grow at Pace and beyond for the long-term.
We're a <40 person team based in-person in New York and are lucky to be perfectly positioned with leading customers and top investors to make a real impact on one of the largest industries in the world.
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