Principal AI Security Engineer

zipcolimited; United States; Remote; USD 203,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first (US)

Office in Manhattan (optional)

Job summary

Zipcolimited is seeking a hands-on principal-level security engineering leader to set the technical direction for AI applications, agents, and AI-enabled software. You will partner with engineering, platform, and security teams to enable AI adoption while protecting systems, data, and enterprise integrations.

You will design architectures, implement defenses, and establish secure patterns for model access, identities, and secrets, while mentoring engineers across teams.

Qualifications

• Staff or principal-level leadership in security engineering, application security, or cloud security.
• Hands-on security engineering experience for LLMs, agents, or AI-enabled systems.
• Strong knowledge of LLM architectures, agentic systems, and modern AI development frameworks.
• Familiarity with OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, MITRE ATLAS, and NIST AI RMF.

Responsibilities

• Design security architecture for AI applications, agents, and AI-enabled products.
• Defend against prompt injection, data exposure, unsafe tool execution, and excessive agent permissions.
• Establish secure patterns for model access, service identities, authorization, secrets, and sensitive data.
• Create guardrails and reusable components for AI coding assistants, agent tools, MCP integrations, and CI/CD.

Skills

Security leadership

LLM security

Agent systems security

Threat modeling

Job description

Role overview

Set technical direction and build practical security controls for LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation systems, autonomous agents, and AI-supported software development. This hands-on principal-level role partners with engineering, platform, and security teams to enable AI adoption while protecting systems, data, and enterprise integrations.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement security architecture for AI applications, agents, and AI-enabled products.
• Build defenses against prompt injection, data exposure, unsafe tool execution, and excessive agent permissions.
• Establish secure patterns for model access, service identities, authorization, secrets, and sensitive information.
• Create guardrails and reusable components for AI coding assistants, agent tools, MCP integrations, and CI/CD workflows.
• Develop automated security evaluations, red-team exercises, regression tests, monitoring, and detection for suspicious AI activity.
• Set engineering standards, assess models and third-party tools, guide risk classification, and mentor engineers across teams.

Requirements

• Staff or principal-level leadership in security engineering, application security, or cloud security.
• Deep security engineering expertise plus hands-on experience building or securing LLM or agent systems.
• Strong knowledge of LLM architectures, agentic systems, RAG, and contemporary AI development frameworks.
• Familiarity with OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, MITRE ATLAS, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
• Ability to turn complex threats into code, architecture, and workable engineering practices.

Benefits and work setup

• Remote-first position for US-based employees, with an option to work from an office in Manhattan.
• Published US base salary range: USD 203,000-254,000; additional compensation and benefits may be included.
• Visa sponsorship is not available.