Head of security

Airtm; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Airtm is seeking a Head of Security to build and lead security across the platform, reporting to the VP of Engineering. You will own security posture for money-movement systems, drive strategy, build the team, and stay hands-on for critical tech calls.

Stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Kubernetes (AWS), React, and AI-assisted development. You will embed security as an enabler, not a gate, with a focus on AI safety and compliance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in information or application security.
• 3+ years leading security teams or functions.
• Experience leading incident response for high-stakes incidents.

Responsibilities

• Define and own a risk-based security strategy and roadmap.
• Lead incident response, runbooks, and post-incident reviews.
• Embed security in the SDLC with threat modeling and secure design reviews.
• Harden AWS, Kubernetes, networking, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Own IAM, secrets management, and security in Terraform and GitOps workflows.
• Build detection and monitoring across apps and infra.
• Define guardrails for AI coding tools, agents and LLM pipelines.
• Oversee compliance programs (SOC 2) and vendor risk.
• Mentor and grow security engineers; establish security champions network.

Skills

InfoSec leadership

Incident response

AWS security

Security leadership

Job description

About us:

Airtm is a financial-infrastructure company building the future of the online-work economy. We are on a mission to empower the world's growing number of Digital Entrepreneurs in the Global South, giving them the financial freedom to thrive.

The problem is clear: in emerging markets, accessing the dollar economy is difficult. Cross-border payments are slow, expensive, and often lose value to inflation. This limits the potential of millions of talented individuals.

Airtm’s solution is a swift and comprehensive financial platform that facilitates low-value cross-border payments and local cash-outs. As pioneers in stablecoin-payment infrastructure, Airtm has built the most advanced cross-border payment system available on the market.

As a company married to the world of online work, Airtm will go beyond payments to build the necessary infrastructure the online-work economy needs to thrive. We are fostering an entirely new economy, giving individuals, communities, and countries the tools to take control of their financial destinies.

About the Role

We're looking for a Head of Security to build and lead security at Airtm, reporting to the VP of Engineering. You'll own the security posture of the systems that move people's money across borders, from application code and cloud infrastructure to identity, vendors, and incident response. You'll set the strategy, build the team and the practices around it, and stay hands-on enough to make the hard technical calls yourself.

Our stack is TypeScript/Node.js microservices on Kubernetes (AWS), with React front ends, organized into autonomous product teams. Security here works as an enabler embedded in how teams ship, not a gate at the end. AI-assisted development is core to how we build, so you'll be expected to use AI tooling fluently for security work, and to define how we adopt AI agents and LLM-powered systems safely.

Key Responsibilities

• Security Strategy & Roadmap: Define and own a risk-based security strategy for a financial platform; prioritize investment by real threat and business impact, and report on posture to executive leadership and the board

• Incident Response: Own detection, response, and recovery for security incidents; maintain runbooks, lead incidents and post-incident reviews, coordinate with forensics, legal, and communications, and turn every incident into lasting improvements

• Application Security: Embed security into the SDLC with threat modeling, secure design reviews, SAST/DAST/dependency scanning, and secure coding standards that engineers actually adopt

• Cloud & Infrastructure Security: Partner with Infrastructure to harden AWS, Kubernetes, networking, and CI/CD pipelines; own IAM and least-privilege access, secrets management, and security in Terraform and GitOps workflows

• Detection & Monitoring: Build the detection and alerting capability that finds malicious activity early, across application, infrastructure, and access logs, and tune it to keep signal high

• Crypto & Key Security: Own the security model for key management, wallet and custody operations, and the blockchain integrations our payment rails depend on

• Fraud & Account Security Collaboration: Work with Product and Risk teams on account takeover, abuse, and transaction-level controls

• AI Security: Define guardrails for AI coding tools and for AI agents and LLM pipelines we build or deploy, including agent permissions, prompt injection, data exposure, and tool-access boundaries

• Compliance & Assurance: Own our security compliance program (SOC 2 and related frameworks), audits, and customer and partner security questionnaires, aiming to make compliance a byproduct of good engineering rather than a separate burden

• Vendor & Third-Party Risk: Run vendor risk assessments and security due diligence for partners, investors, and acquirers

• Vulnerability & Patch Management: Establish clear SLAs by severity and keep remediation moving across teams without becoming a bottleneck

• Team Building & Mentorship: Hire, grow, and lead security engineers; build a security champions network inside product teams; raise the security bar across all of engineering

• On-Call & Escalation: Participate in and help shape the security escalation path for production incidents

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in information or application security, including 3+ years leading security teams or functions

• Demonstrated experience leading incident response for real, high-stakes incidents, including coordination with external forensics and counsel

• Strong knowledge of AWS security