First Security Leader for Frontier AI Platform

River AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 280,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

River AI is building a security-led foundation for frontier AI research and product development. As the first security hire, you will define and scale our security program across research infrastructure, model weights, and customer platforms.

You will lead a wide range of activities from threat modeling and incident response to governance, risk, and compliance, partnering with product and engineering teams to enable rapid, secure innovation.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in security with a technology company, AI preferred.
• First or early security executive in a high-velocity environment.
• Deep expertise in two or more areas among detection engineering, incident response, digital forensics, infrastructure security, product/application security, operational security, or secure software development.
• Experience securing cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems and compute clusters.
• Ability to build and ship security tooling or research projects.

Responsibilities

• Build the security function from first principles and scale end-to-end security across product and infrastructure.
• Protect proprietary model weights, training data pipelines, research clusters, and source code.
• Design lightweight, automated security controls that empower developers to experiment safely.
• Own 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.
• Represent security to enterprise customers and regulators, leading compliance roadmaps (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP).
• Recruit and mentor security engineers and researchers to raise organizational security standards.

Skills

Security leadership

First security executive

Detection engineering

Incident response

Digital forensics

Infrastructure security

Product security

Operational security

Secure software development

Job description

River AI is building a security-led foundation for frontier AI research and product development. As the first security hire, you will define and scale our security program across research infrastructure, model weights, and customer platforms.

You will lead a wide range of activities from threat modeling and incident response to governance, risk, and compliance, partnering with product and engineering teams to enable rapid, secure innovation.