Security Engineer

Sierra; California (MO); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Life insurance and disability benefits

Retirement plan dependent on country

Parental leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Lunch and snacks

Discretionary benefit stipend

Free alphorn lessons

Job summary

Sierra is seeking a Security Engineer to help build the foundations that keep our AI platform secure by default. You’ll design and ship systems across product security, infrastructure security, identity, and detection, partnering with product and platform teams to reduce risk and protect customer data.

You’ll own cross-cutting security initiatives, model designs, review architectures, and automate security workflows in CI/CD, enabling scalable defenses while balancing usability and performance.

Qualifications

• Deep Security Expertise in at least one domain (product, platform, cloud, identity, or detection & response).
• Ability to design secure, scalable systems and trade-offs between usability, performance, and security.
• Experience reading/writing code and contributing to APIs, services, and security controls.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship systems that make Sierra secure by default across product security, infrastructure security, enterprise security, identity, and detection & response.
• Threat model designs, review architectures, and evolve security primitives in collaboration with product/platform/infra teams.
• Identify vulnerabilities, investigate suspicious activity, and implement systemic fixes and controls to prevent issues.
• Create developer-friendly tooling to automate security checks in CI/CD and improve vulnerability discovery and response workflows.

Skills

Security fundamentals

Product mindset

Software engineering

Ownership & curiosity

Job description

About us

At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We partner with industry leaders such as SoftBank, Uber, Rivian, CLEAR, and Sutter Health. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

Security Engineer

Security Engineering builds the foundations that let Sierra deliver powerful AI agents while protecting customer data and trust. We partner across product and platform to make security, privacy, and safety core product capabilities and secure defaults.

What you’ll do

Our work spans several security domains. You’ll go deep where your strengths and interests are strongest, with opportunities to explore new areas alongside the team.

Build the Foundations of Trust.

Design and ship systems and controls that make Sierra secure by default — spanning product security, infrastructure security, enterprise security, identity, and detection and response. You’ll work across all layers of our platform to identify risk, strengthen architectures, and build durable defenses.

Own Cross-Cutting Systems.

Partner with product, platform, and infrastructure team to threat model designs, review code and architectures, and implement and evolve Sierra’s security primitives. You’ll make pragmatic design trade-offs between usability, performance, reliability, and security.

Find and Reduce Real Risk.

Identify vulnerabilities, investigate suspicious behavior, and improve detections and response workflows across applications, cloud infrastructure, identity, endpoints, and internal systems. Turn what you learn into systemic fixes and controls that prevent entire classes of issues.

Automate and Scale Security Workflows.

Create developer-friendly tooling to reduce risk and friction — whether through automating security checks in CI/CD, building secure paved paths, improving vulnerability discovery, or instrumenting high-signal detection and response.

What you’ll bring

Deep Security Expertise. Strong security fundamentals and depth in at least one domain, such as product security, platform or cloud security, enterprise security, identity, detection and response, or offensive security. You can apply that expertise across unfamiliar systems and emerging threats.

Product and Platform Mindset. You care about building secure, scalable systems that enable, not block, innovation. You work closely with teams across Sierra to make trade-offs clear and help them move quickly without sacrificing trust.

Software Engineering and Systems Thinking. You’re comfortable reading and writing code, understanding how production systems fit together, and building pragmatic software solutions to security problems. You can reason about system design and contribute to APIs, services, and security controls, with an eye toward reliability and maintainability.

Curiosity and Ownership. You take ambiguous, cross-cutting problems from first principles to production and go deep when needed: threat modeling a distributed system, tracing an authorization decision across services, or following an investigation from weak signal to root cause. You define the problem, align partners, build the solution, and own it in production.

Even better if…

• You’ve worked across more than one of product security, infrastructure security, enterprise security, detection and response, or offensive security.

• You’ve built security frameworks, platforms, or solutions that engineers and responders rely on to prevent, detect, investigate, and remediate security issues at scale.

• You have exposure to AI systems or care about designing secure‑by‑default LLM applications and agentic systems.

• You think like an attacker — you naturally ask “what could go wrong?” when reviewing designs or investigating systems. You’ve found or fixed real security issues in production.

• You thrive in 0 1 environments, where foundational systems have to balance speed, reliability, and trust.

Our values

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

• Life insurance and disability benefits

• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

• Parental leave

• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized

• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.