Lead Security Engineer

We are looking for a Lead Security Engineer (Application Security and AI Security) with 8+ years of experience to help secure HighLevel's products, platforms, and AI-powered capabilities. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on building and scaling application security practices while driving security initiatives for AI-enabled products. You will work closely with engineering, product, infrastructure, and AI teams to embed security into every stage of the software development lifecycle. You'll provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, influence secure architecture decisions, and help define the future of security across our engineering organization.

Responsibilities:

• Lead application security initiatives across HighLevel's products and engineering teams.
• Proliferate security standards recommended by the central security team as best practices within Dev teams.
• Conduct architecture reviews, secure design assessments, and threat modeling for new features and platforms.
• Perform security assessments for web, mobile, and API-based applications.
• Define and drive secure SDLC practices across engineering teams.
• Partner with developers to identify, prioritize, and remediate security vulnerabilities.
• Lead security reviews for AI/LLM-powered applications, agents, and AI integrations.
• Develop security guardrails for AI systems, including protections against prompt injection, data leakage, insecure tool usage, model abuse, and emerging AI attack techniques.
• Improve security tooling and automate security testing within CI/CD pipelines.
• Champion secure coding practices through developer enablement, documentation, and training.
• Drive vulnerability management efforts and improve remediation workflows.
• Mentor engineers and foster a strong security-first engineering culture.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration by communicating complex security risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders, influencing product roadmaps, and ensuring alignment between security priorities and engineering objectives.
• Stay current with emerging threats, application security trends, and advancements in AI security.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in cybersecurity, with deep expertise in application security and leading engineering-focused security initiatives.
• Comprehensive technical knowledge in securing Web, mobile (Android/iOS), and API (REST/GraphQL) environments, including OWASP standards and authentication protocols (OAuth 2.0 OIDC, JWT, SAML).
• Proven experience performing security assessments, including threat modeling, secure design/code reviews, penetration testing, and architecture reviews.
• Hands-on DevSecOps proficiency: automating security in CI/CD pipelines, container security (Kubernetes/Docker), and managing security tooling (SAST, DAST, SCA, Secret Scanning).
• Specialized expertise in AI/LLM security, including mitigation of prompt injection, data leakage, model misuse, and insecure agent/tool integration.
• Proficiency in programming/scripting (Python, Go, JavaScript, or Bash) and strong communication skills to influence technical stakeholders across product and engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience securing workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code security (Terraform).
• Familiarity with CSPM/CNAPP solutions.
• Experience leading or participating in red teaming, adversary simulation, or purple team exercises.
• Experience with DevSecOps and security automation.
• Security certifications such as CEH, OSCP, GWAPT, CISSP, GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer, or similar.
• Contributions to open-source security projects, bug bounty programs, or security research.