Product Security Engineer

BackOps AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health coverage

401k

Flexible PTO

Office meals & events

Job summary

BackOps AI in the San Francisco Bay Area is hiring its first dedicated product security engineer. You will own the security of the BackOps product end to end, build the secure development lifecycle, and ship guardrails that keep engineers secure without slowing innovation.

In this hands-on role, you will read code, write fixes, and collaborate with engineering, infrastructure, and product to define secure-by-design practices as the company scales.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in product or application security engineering, or a software engineer who moved into security
• Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or TypeScript, and ability to review real code
• Depth in authentication, authorization, and multi-tenant isolation: OAuth/OIDC, RBAC, tokens
• OWASP Top 10 for web, APIs, and agentic apps, with practical exploit understanding

Responsibilities

• Own product security end to end for the BackOps product
• Define and implement the secure development lifecycle with design and code review standards
• Run vulnerability management end to end: find, prioritize, fix, verify
• Lead security reviews, penetration tests, and coordinated vulnerability disclosure
• Extend controls to customer-hosted and on-prem deployments

Skills

Security engineering

Programming in Python/Go/TypeScript

OAuth/OIDC & RBAC

Threat modeling

Written & verbal communication

Tools

SAST

DAST

SCA

Secrets scanning

Job description

BackOps AI transforms supply-chain operations with agentic AI that automates complex workflows, freeing teams to focus on what matters most. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, we foster a culture of innovation, ownership, and measurable impact.

The Role

Our agents take real actions inside our customers' live operations. They read from and write to the systems a supply-chain team runs its business on. That makes authorization, tenant isolation, and the blast radius of a single agent action product design questions, and it puts product security on the critical path of every enterprise deal we close.

We are looking for the engineer who owns that. This is a hands‑on role and the first dedicated product security hire, so you will build the product security practice and do the work at the same time.

You will work closely with engineering and infrastructure on how our systems get built and run, and with product on what gets built next. You will read the code, write the fix, and ship guardrails that engineers keep switched on because they are fast and mostly right.

Your Impact

In this role, you will own the security of the BackOps product end to end, and set the bar for how secure software gets built here while the company triples in size.

• Own product security end to end: authentication, authorization, multi-tenant isolation, APIs, and the data model behind them.
• Threat model the agent platform. Define what an agent is allowed to do in a customer's systems, prove the boundary holds, and design what happens when an agent is asked to do something it should not.
• Build the secure development lifecycle: design review, code review standards, and scanning in CI with a triage path engineers actually use.
• Run application vulnerability management end to end. Find it, prioritize it by real exploitability rather than by scanner severity, get it fixed, verify the fix.
• Set the security bar for AI-assisted code. A large share of our code is written with coding agents, and human ownership of what merges is not optional.
• Secure the software supply chain: dependencies, build pipeline, artifacts, and third-party integrations.
• Own the engineering side of enterprise security reviews, penetration tests, and coordinated vulnerability disclosure, so customer scrutiny stops being a fire drill.
• Extend the same controls to customer-hosted and on-prem deployments, where they have to hold up without our infrastructure around them.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years in product or application security engineering, or a software engineer who moved into security and stayed hands-on.
• Strong coding skills in Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar. You review real code and write the fix yourself.
• Real depth in authentication, authorization, and multi-tenant isolation: OAuth and OIDC, RBAC, token and session handling, and the access-control bugs that only show up between two features.
• Web and API security depth across the OWASP Top 10 classes: injection, SSRF, deserialization, and broken access control, and how these actually get exploited rather than how they are listed.
• Working familiarity with the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. Excessive agency and prompt injection are live concerns in our product today.
• Threat modeling that produces engineering work with owners and dates, not a document.
• Hands‑on with SAST, DAST, SCA, and secrets scanning in CI, including keeping the noise low enough that teams do not turn the checks off.
• Judgment about risk. You can say what to fix now, what to accept, and why, to an audience that will push back.
• Clear written and verbal communication with engineers, executives, and customers, including saying plainly what is still unknown.
• Comfortable defining the structure while doing the work, in a company where requirements change week to week.

Nice to Have

• Hands‑on securing LLM or agentic systems: prompt injection, insecure tool use, excessive agency and permissions, sandboxing, and handling model output as untrusted input.
• SOC 2 Type I/II, ISO 27001, or similar audits taken end to end, and compliance automation tooling such as Vanta or Drata.
• Enterprise security reviews and customer questionnaires answered from the engineering seat.
• Multi‑tenant B2B SaaS, and on‑prem or customer‑hosted deployment.
• Running a bug bounty or coordinated disclosure program.
• Security capabilities delivered as an internal product, with real adoption numbers behind them.
• Standing up a product security function where none existed: charter, practices, and the culture around it.

What Success Looks Like

• What an agent can do inside a customer's systems is bounded by design, and we can demonstrate the boundary holds.
• Security shows up when a feature is being designed, rather than as a gate in front of the release.
• Vulnerabilities are found earlier and fixed faster, and we can show the trend.
• Enterprise security reviews stop holding up deals.
• Engineers keep the automated checks on because they are fast and usually right.
• Teams ship secure features without you in the room.

Why BackOps

• Own product security at an AI‑native company while the product is still being shaped.
• Our agents take real actions in customer operations, which makes this work matter more here than it does in most places.
• Small team with real autonomy and direct access to founders and customers.
• Backed by exceptional investors and advisors.

Rewards

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan, disability insurance, and life insurance.
• Flexible time off.
• Daily meals in the office, and regular team events and offsites.