Head of Security - AI Product & Infrastructure

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Relocation assistance

Job summary

River AI is seeking a deeply technical Security Lead to build and lead security across product and infrastructure. You will protect model weights, data pipelines, and research clusters while enabling rapid frontier AI development.

This is the first security hire, combining hands-on engineering leadership with strategic security program development. You will own incident response, detection, and compliance roadmaps, partnering with research and engineering teams to embed security into the SDLC

Qualifications

• 10+ years in security with technology industry experience.
• First or early security executive experience in a high-velocity environment.
• Expertise in two or more areas: detection engineering, incident response, digital forensics, infrastructure security, product/security, or secure software development.
• Experience securing cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems, container/VM environments, and HPC clusters.
• Proven ability to build and ship security tooling or research projects (internal platforms, OSS, or commercial products).
• Strong cross-functional presence: translate risk for execs, partner with researchers on threat models, review code/architecture.
• Interested in AI safety, alignment, and AI model/agent security challenges.

Responsibilities

• Build the security function from first principles and scale end-to-end security operations.
• Protect proprietary model weights, data pipelines, research clusters, and source code.
• Design lightweight, automated security controls and secure-by-default infrastructure.
• Integrate security with IT and privacy engineering for a seamless employee experience.
• Drive security research and tooling, exploring AI-enabled vulnerability discovery and defense.
• Lead external security communication with customers, regulators, and boards; drive compliance roadmap.
• Recruit and mentor security engineers and researchers to raise the security bar across the org.

Skills

Security leadership

Strategy development

Incident response

Cloud security

Distributed systems security

Secure software development

Executive communication

AI security understanding

Job description

River AI is seeking a deeply technical Security Lead to build and lead security across product and infrastructure. You will protect model weights, data pipelines, and research clusters while enabling rapid frontier AI development.

This is the first security hire, combining hands-on engineering leadership with strategic security program development. You will own incident response, detection, and compliance roadmaps, partnering with research and engineering teams to embed security into the SDLC