Founding Security Engineer

Who you are

You have hands-on experience in building and maintaining secure infrastructure — you know your way around cloud security fundamentals, including multi-account AWS permissions and architectures, IAM design, and secure CI/CD pipelines. Your expertise extends to secrets management, key management, and certificate lifecycles, ensuring that security measures are both robust and efficient. You are vigilant about vulnerabilities and potential attacks, constantly thinking about how to operate securely with the introduction of new technologies, including OS-level and AI coding agents. You have owned compliance efforts such as HIPAA and SOC2, demonstrating your commitment to maintaining high standards in security practices.

You are comfortable with security hardening and understand the details needed to make engineering systems run smoothly, including VPNs and development servers. Your proactive approach to security means you are always on the lookout for ways to improve and innovate within the security landscape. You thrive in a fast-paced environment where your contributions directly impact the security posture of the organization.

Desirable

Experience with incident response and creating security incident response playbooks is a plus. Familiarity with monitoring and alerting for anomalous behavior across APIs and internal services will set you apart. You are also encouraged to bring any experience you have with building security systems that do not hinder developer velocity, as this is a critical aspect of our operations.

What you'll do

As the Founding Security Engineer at Exa, you will be critical in making our systems run securely while ensuring our shipping velocity. You will build the protective shield for all of Exa’s systems, which include processing web-scale data, indexing hundreds of billions of pages, and training foundational models on terabytes of data. Your role will involve developing security measures that allow us to serve thousands of enterprise customers from our endpoints without compromising on security.

You will lead efforts to build a secrets management and rotation system used across distributed services, training jobs, and GPU clusters. This system will be designed to operate seamlessly without impacting developer velocity. Additionally, you will create monitoring and alerting systems for detecting anomalous behavior across our APIs and internal services, ensuring that any potential threats are identified and addressed promptly.

Your responsibilities will also include leading incident handling from detection to post-mortem, ensuring that we learn from any security incidents and continuously improve our practices. You will collaborate closely with engineering teams to integrate security into the development lifecycle, promoting a culture of security awareness and best practices across the organization.

What we offer

At Exa, we are building a search engine from scratch to serve every AI application, and you will play a pivotal role in this mission. We offer a competitive salary and the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment where your contributions will have a direct impact on our success. You will have access to cutting-edge technology, including a $5M H200 GPU cluster, and the chance to work with a talented team dedicated to innovation and excellence.

We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't match every requirement. We value diverse perspectives and believe that a variety of experiences can contribute to our success. Join us in shaping the future of AI applications and making a significant impact in the tech industry.