Manager, Security Engineering

About Acquia

Acquia empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to create digital customer experiences that matter. With open source Drupal at its core, the Acquia Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables marketers, developers, and IT operations teams at thousands of global organizations to rapidly compose and deploy digital products and services that engage customers, enhance conversions, and help businesses stand out.

Headquartered in Boston, MA, Acquia is a Great Place to Work-CertifiedTM company, is listed as one of the world’s top software companies by The Software Report, and is positioned as a market leader by the analyst community. We are Acquia. We are building for the future and we want you to be a part of it! 

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You will discover the opportunity to grow your career here and learn from a global team that empowers you to exceed boundaries and achieve the extraordinary.

Role Overview

As the Manager of Security Engineering, you lead a specialized team of security engineers focused on application security, cloud security, and AI system security across Acquia's product portfolio. Operating on an evidence-based engineering model, your team proactively researches and identifies systemic security gaps to build automated controls and guardrails. By securing cloud-native applications and services across AWS, you enable Acquia's Product teams to inherit a “secure by default” foundation. You act as the critical nexus between Security Operations and Product Engineering, translating complex technical risks into actionable roadmaps that align with overarching business objectives—including the secure adoption of AI technologies.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & People Management

Manage, mentor, and grow a dedicated team of security engineers.

Conduct continuous performance evaluations (quarterly and annually) to guide professional development and advocate for promotions.

Technical Strategy & Roadmap Execution

Define and execute a forward-looking security engineering roadmap aligned with Product Engineering needs and broader business initiatives, including the secure enablement of AI technologies.

Translate high-level business direction into actionable quarterly deliverables for the team.

Establish and measure team success against the completion of quarterly goals and the continuous improvement of annual compliance audit results.

Application Security & Secure SDLC

Champion shift-left security practices, including threat modeling, secure code review, and developer security training embedded in the software development lifecycle.

Own and scale application security tooling—SAST, DAST, and SCA platforms—to systematically surface and remediate vulnerabilities across product codebases.

Shift the security paradigm from manual operational cleanup to building automated solutions and guardrails that eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities.

Evidence-Based Engineering & Cloud Security Architecture

Lead “research spikes” to proactively investigate cloud-native environments and identify systemic security gaps before they become incidents.

Ensure all security initiatives are rooted in clear findings and deliver exact, architectural fixes (code or configuration) to resolve them.

Define and enforce cloud security standards spanning IAM, API security, secrets management, and container workloads across AWS environments.

Agentic AI & LLM Security

Define and enforce security standards for internal enterprise AI systems, including LLM-based agents, RAG pipelines, and AI-integrated workflows—covering risks such as prompt injection, data exfiltration, and privilege escalation.

Lead threat modeling for agentic AI systems where models have access to tools, APIs, or sensitive data.

Partner with AI/ML engineering teams to embed security review into AI development lifecycles, from model selection through deployment.

Evaluate and deploy AI-native security tooling to augment the team’s detection, triage, and remediation capacity.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Influence

Act as an internal consultant and advisory body to Product Engineering teams, guiding them on secure implementation practices.

Communicate complex, highly technical security risks effectively to non-technical project managers and stakeholders.

Influence and negotiate with software developers to prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities within their workflows.

Serve as the primary technical bridge between Product Engineering and Security Operations, providing guidance on cloud and Kubernetes security configurations.

Qualifications & Technical Requirements

Application Security: Hands-on experience with SAST, DAST, and SCA tooling (e.g., Semgrep, Snyk, Veracode, or equivalents) and guiding engineering teams on remediation.

Cloud Security: Deep understanding of securing cloud-native applications and services on AWS, including IAM, API Gateway, secrets management, and container workloads.

AI Security: Working knowledge of OWASP LLM Top 10, agentic AI attack surfaces (tool abuse, prompt injection, memory poisoning), and security considerations for AI systems with external integrations.

AI Tooling: Experience using AI-assisted security tools—such as AI-powered SAST, copilot-assisted code review, or agentic vulnerability triage—to scale team output.

Compliance Acumen: Strong working knowledge of the technical implications of operating within strict compliance frameworks, including ISO/SOC, PCI, and FedRAMP.

Communication Skills: Exceptional ability to translate highly technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and the interpersonal skills required to influence engineering teams without direct reporting authority.

We are an organization that embraces innovation and the potential of AI to enhance our processes and improve our work. We are always looking for individuals who are open to learning new technologies and collaborating with AI tools to achieve our goals.

Acquia is proud to provide best-in-class benefits to help our employees and their families maintain a healthy body and mind. Core Benefits include: competitive healthcare coverage, wellness programs, take it when you need it time off, parental leave, recognition programs, and much more!

Acquia is an equal opportunity (EEO) employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veterans status or any other protected status or characteristic under federal, state or local law unrelated to the ability to perform the job.

We are seeking an AI-Native candidate who treats AI not as an external tool, but as a fundamental extension of their cognitive workflow. The ideal candidate possesses an orchestration mindset—the ability to skillfully prompt, manage, and direct AI to navigate complexity—and maintains a high degree of AI fluency.

You should be characterized by radical adaptability and a "builder" mentality, showing a restless drive to transform traditional work processes into agentic workflows. Beyond technical proficiency, we value intellectual humility: the willingness to constantly unlearn old methods in favor of more efficient, AI-augmented processes. You don't just use AI to do your job; you use it to redefine what your job can achieve.