First Security Leader - AI Infra & Product

River AI; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health/Dental/Vision

Unlimited PTO

Relocation assistance

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

River AI is building frontier AI systems and a security function from the ground up in Palo Alto. You will lead security engineering, incident response, and governance for a fast-moving research and product environment, balancing safety, compliance, and rapid deployment.

You will own security across infrastructure, model weights, data pipelines, and enterprise platforms, while shaping a security culture that accelerates development and protects valuable assets.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in security with a technology company, AI preferred.

Responsibilities

• Build the security function from first principles and scale end-to-end security operations across product and infrastructure.
• Protect proprietary model weights, data pipelines, research clusters, and source code from threats and intellectual property theft.
• Design lightweight, secure-by-default controls that let researchers move fast without bureaucratic drag.
• Own corporate IT, identity and access management, and privacy engineering for a secure employee experience.
• Drive security research and tooling to advance vulnerability discovery and defensive operations.
• Lead the external trust narrative and own the regulatory roadmap (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP).
• Recruit and mentor security engineers and researchers who automate repetitive work and embed security into SDLC.

Skills

Security leadership

Security strategy

Threat modeling

Cloud security

Incident response

Security tooling

AI safety

Cross-functional

Job description

River AI is building frontier AI systems and a security function from the ground up in Palo Alto. You will lead security engineering, incident response, and governance for a fast-moving research and product environment, balancing safety, compliance, and rapid deployment.

You will own security across infrastructure, model weights, data pipelines, and enterprise platforms, while shaping a security culture that accelerates development and protects valuable assets.