Security Advocate

Nightfall AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Nightfall AI is seeking an experienced security engineer to lead investigations and serve as a public voice for security operations and data security. You will test models, explain findings on camera and in writing, and build open-source tools used by SOC teams.

You will also speak at conferences, run hands-on workshops, and help grow our security community by hosting podcasts and creating practical demos for customers and partners.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in security engineering, detection engineering, incident response, insider risk/DLP, security research or sales engineering.
• Established public voice in security: talks, a podcast, research write-ups, open-source projects or a following practitioners trust.
• You can code, work with APIs and debug across unfamiliar systems.
• You understand how enterprise data moves across SaaS, endpoints and AI tools, and how security controls like DLP, CASB, SIEM and EDR work.
• You can explain a technical finding clearly and defend it under questioning.
• You enjoy talking with security practitioners and engineers, on camera and in person.
• You follow through on the software and content you publish.

Responsibilities

• Run "The Model Did What?" investigations. Test new models, agents and AI tools against realistic enterprise workflows. Find concrete data exposures, build working reproductions, and show where security controls hold or fail.
• Explain it on camera and in writing. Open your laptop and walk through what happened. Turn findings into technical videos, blog posts and demos that SOC and data security teams want to watch and share, working with our content team.
• Build open-source tools. Ship detections, scanners, labs and utilities that practitioners actually use. Document them, respond to issues, and maintain them after launch.
• Speak and teach. Give talks at security and engineering conferences (BSides, Black Hat, DEF CON villages). Run hands-on workshops where participants reproduce the problem and test a defense themselves.
• Build the community. Host or join podcasts, livestreams and practitioner communities. Bring what you hear from security teams back to product and marketing.
• Equip our sales engineers. Create realistic, resettable demo environments with synthetic data, plus the scenarios and documentation SEs need to run them on their own.

Skills

Security engineering

Public speaker

Coding & APIs

Data flow security

Communication skills

Follow-through

Job description

About Nightfall:

Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce.

Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others.

About the role:

A hands-on security research role with a public voice: the DevRel function for security operations and data security.

AI models and agents give software new ways to access and move company data. We want someone who will test what that makes possible, find where data actually leaks, and show security teams what they found.

You might be a detection engineer, incident responder or insider-risk engineer who enjoys explaining your work. Or a security advocate, researcher or SE who wants more time to build. At Nightfall, you'll own technical investigations end to end and become a trusted public voice for the company with SOC, IR and data security practitioners.

What you'll do

• Run "The Model Did What?" investigations. Test new models, agents and AI tools against realistic enterprise workflows. Find concrete data exposures, build working reproductions, and show where security controls hold or fail.

• Explain it on camera and in writing. Open your laptop and walk through what happened. Turn findings into technical videos, blog posts and demos that SOC and data security teams want to watch and share, working with our content team.

• Build open-source tools. Ship detections, scanners, labs and utilities that practitioners actually use. Document them, respond to issues, and maintain them after launch.

• Speak and teach. Give talks at security and engineering conferences (BSides, Black Hat, DEF CON villages and similar). Run hands‑on workshops where participants reproduce the problem and test a defense themselves.

• Build the community. Host or join podcasts, livestreams and practitioner communities. Bring what you hear from security teams back to product and marketing.

• Equip our sales engineers. Create realistic, resettable demo environments with synthetic data, plus the scenarios and documentation SEs need to run them on their own.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years in security engineering, detection engineering, incident response, insider risk/DLP, security research or sales engineering.

• An established public voice in security: talks, a podcast, research write-ups, open-source projects or a following practitioners trust.

• You can code, work with APIs and debug across unfamiliar systems.

• You understand how enterprise data moves across SaaS, endpoints and AI tools, and how security controls like DLP, CASB, SIEM and EDR work.

• You can explain a technical finding clearly and defend it under questioning.

• You enjoy talking with security practitioners and engineers, on camera and in person.

• You follow through on the software and content you publish.

Nice to have: experience as a security advocate, evangelist or DevRel at a security vendor; hands‑on work with LLMs, AI agents or MCP; SOC or data security operations experience.

Public work can be a small tool, a strong write‑up or a clear demo. We care about the quality of your thinking and what you built, not the title you held.

Environment

Nightfall AI takes pride in being an equal‑opportunity employer. We value a diverse and global talent pool and the collaboration that results from having a diverse and inclusive team. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our hiring decisions are based exclusively on merit, qualifications, and business needs.

Compensation

Employee compensation will be determined based on interview performance, level of experience, specialization of skills, and market rate. During the offer discussion, your recruiter will review the finalized base salary, bonus (for applicable roles), benefits & perks, and stock options as they’ll be reflected in the offer letter.