Head of Security, AI & Cloud — Build from the Ground Up

Harrison Clarke; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Harrison Clarke is partnering with a highly ambitious AI company to hire its first dedicated security leader. This is a true 0 to 1 security role where you will define and build the security function from the ground up, staying deeply hands-on across security engineering, cloud infrastructure, identity, and AI-specific threats.

You’ll own building the function, designing security across cloud, IAM, endpoints, and internal systems, developing threat models, partnering with engineering, and taking

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience across security engineering, product security, infrastructure security, offensive security, or related disciplines.
• Strong hands-on engineering background; not purely managerial or governance-focused.
• Experience as first security hire or building security in an early-stage environment.
• Strong coding ability, ideally with Python, Go, or another systems/backend language.
• Deep expertise in at least one security domain with breadth to operate as a security generalist.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, identity, application security, and modern software development environments.
• Offensive security mindset from red teaming, pentesting, vulnerability research, or adversarial testing.
• Genuine interest in AI and emerging AI security challenges.
• Autonomy to solve problems where playbooks may not exist.
• Strong communication to work with engineers and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Build the security function from the ground up, including strategy, architecture, roadmap, tooling, and implementation.
• Design and implement security across cloud infrastructure, IAM, endpoints, applications, and internal systems.
• Establish security standards and controls with minimal friction for engineering teams.
• Develop threat models for AI/ML systems, infrastructure, and new attack surfaces.
• Partner with engineering on architecture reviews, threat modeling, adversarial testing, and improvements.
• Hands-on security engineering, including coding and internal tooling development.

Skills

Hands-on engineering

Python/Go coding

Threat modeling

Cloud security

Job description

Harrison Clarke is partnering with a highly ambitious AI company to hire its first dedicated security leader. This is a true 0 to 1 security role where you will define and build the security function from the ground up, staying deeply hands-on across security engineering, cloud infrastructure, identity, and AI-specific threats.

You’ll own building the function, designing security across cloud, IAM, endpoints, and internal systems, developing threat models, partnering with engineering, and taking