Remote Application Security Engineer I

Affirm; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Equity

Monthly stipends for health and tech

Benefits including medical coverage

Job summary

Affirm is seeking an early-career Application Security Engineer to join the InfoSec & IT team. The role focuses on identifying application security risks, supporting vulnerability management, and partnering with engineering to implement secure design decisions and lightweight tooling.

This is a remote-first role with strong emphasis on consented collaboration across product and engineering teams. The candidate should be comfortable reading code, have hands-on software or security experience, and

Qualifications

• 0-2+ years of experience in application security, software engineering, security engineering, vulnerability management, penetration testing, security operations, or equivalent practical experience.
• Comfort reading, navigating, and reasoning about code, even in unfamiliar codebases.
• Experience using Git and GitHub or similar version-control workflows, including branches, commits, pull requests, code review, issues, or project tracking.
• Some hands-on experience building, testing, breaking, or securing software.
• Ability to write clear, maintainable scripts or small programs to solve practical problems, automate manual workflows, analyze data, validate findings, or improve security processes.
• Foundational understanding of common web, API, mobile, cloud, and application security risks, such as OWASP Top 10 issues, authentication and authorization flaws, injection, insecure design, secrets exposure, dependency risks, and data protection concerns.
• Interest in offensive security, such as studying for or completing security certifications, practicing web/API testing, learning exploit development fundamentals, using tools like Burp Suite, or participating in labs and capture-the-flag environments.
• Exposure to vulnerability management concepts, including triage, severity assessment, remediation tracking, false-positive analysis, compensating controls, and risk-based prioritization.
• Ability to reason about risk and tradeoffs, not just identify issues.
• Strong product and engineering empathy.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills.
• A collaborative mindset across product, engineering, compliance, risk, infrastructure, and security teams.
• Curiosity, humility, and a growth mindset.
• Secure-by-design judgment, including the ability to spot patterns, recommend simple controls, and balance launch velocity with meaningful risk reduction.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product and engineering teams to identify application security risks and help frame them as clear business risks, launch options, and recommended next steps.
• Read application code, configuration, pull requests, logs, and documentation to understand how systems work and where security risks may exist.
• Contribute small code changes, scripts, detections, tests, secure defaults, or automation that improve AppSec workflows and reduce recurring issues.
• Work in GitHub to review code changes, understand engineering context, participate in pull request discussions, track remediation work, and collaborate with engineers.
• Help evaluate vulnerabilities from internal testing, bug bounty reports, security tooling, penetration tests, and other sources; partner with teams to prioritize and remediate issues based on real-world risk.
• Contribute to vulnerability management workflows, including triage, validation, severity assessment, remediation guidance, tracking, and reporting.
• Translate recurring security findings into repeatable mechanisms such as secure coding guidance, checklists, paved paths, lightweight automation, detection logic, reusable review patterns, or developer-facing documentation.
• Work with engineers to understand system designs, data flows, trust boundaries, authentication and authorization models, code paths, and potential abuse cases.
• Communicate security issues clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including the risk, tradeoffs, recommended mitigations, and residual risk.
• Build strong relationships across affirm teams and influence security outcomes without relying on formal authority.
• Help connect AppSec work to customer trust, regulatory/compliance expectations, operational resilience, and business outcomes.
• Continue developing hands-on offensive, defensive, and software engineering skills through practical work, labs, tooling, research, certifications, or contributions to internal security programs.

Skills

Git

GitHub

Code reading

Scripting

Automation

Vulnerability management

Offensive security

Secure coding

Tools

Burp Suite

Job description

Affirm is seeking an early-career Application Security Engineer to join the InfoSec & IT team. The role focuses on identifying application security risks, supporting vulnerability management, and partnering with engineering to implement secure design decisions and lightweight tooling.

This is a remote-first role with strong emphasis on consented collaboration across product and engineering teams. The candidate should be comfortable reading code, have hands-on software or security experience, and