Security Engineer

Traversal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 240,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Traversal is seeking a Security Engineer to raise the security floor by building AI-native security mechanisms across product, cloud, and infrastructure. This senior, high-impact role partners with security leadership to shape the roadmap, own foundational security systems end-to-end, and drive secure delivery for enterprise customers.

You will lead security initiatives spanning authentication, access controls, and risk management, mentoring engineers and collaborating with product and

Qualifications

• 4-6+ years building or securing production software or infrastructure.
• Lead ambiguous cross-team security projects from design through implementation.
• Strong programming in Python, Rust, or Go and able to work in an existing codebase.
• Hands-on depth in application or cloud security, with working knowledge of the other.
• Technical depth in risk assessment referencing NIST & SOC2 as a starting point.
• Understanding authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, secrets and distributed systems.
• Clear written communication and collaborative approach to disputes.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship secure libraries, defaults, and workflows for secure building.
• Define and implement controls that verify security across products and cloud infra.
• Build security capabilities into Traversal’s products for enterprise use.
• Discover issues, verify, and ship fixes with system owners and tests.
• Architect security systems and components for SaaS and BYOC deployments.
• Lead multi-phase rollouts, migrations, and deprecations with measurable success.
• Ship operationally complete systems with monitoring and safe rollout paths.
• Set direction for security domains and align with product/engineering leadership.
• Mentor engineers and create reusable patterns and references.

Skills

Security leadership

Go/Python/Rust

Cloud security

Risk assessment

Auth & AuthZ

Written communication

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

About Traversal

Traversal is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise.

Production complexity was already outpacing what engineering teams could manage manually, and AI-generated code is accelerating that gap. Traversal is built for that challenge, autonomously understanding and reasoning across even the largest, most complex production environments to diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and give them more time to focus on creative, high-impact work.

Today, Traversal operates in mission-critical environments at some of the world’s largest enterprises. Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’ve brought together researchers from institutions including MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell with world-class technical staff and operators from companies like Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, and Citadel Securities to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Traversal is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Hanabi, NFDG, and American Express Ventures.

The Role

As a Security Engineer at Traversal, your mission is to raise the security floor across the company by building AI-native security mechanisms tailored to how we work. This is not a compliance role, and it isn’t about the basics like adding SAST to pipelines. You’ll partner with our security leadership team to shape the security roadmap across product, cloud, and infrastructure, and you’ll own broad-scope projects within it: designing and shipping the secure foundations Traversal engineers build on, and driving us toward a future where automated verification, not manual code review, decides whether a change is safe to ship. You’ll also build security capabilities directly into Traversal’s products and cloud infrastructure to safeguard our enterprise customers and their data.

Traversal serves Fortune 50 enterprises across multi-tenant environments, BYOC deployments, and several compliance regimes. Your work will span application behavior, identity, infrastructure, deployment boundaries, data security, and access controls, continuously pushing Traversal’s security posture forward.

We welcome strong software and infrastructure engineers who have owned security-critical systems and want to specialize in security. We also welcome experienced security engineers who want to build. Either way, you’ll lead and deliver your area independently. This is a senior, high-impact role: you’ll own foundational security systems end to end. As your scope grows, you’ll also set technical direction across related work streams and build capabilities other teams adopt and extend.

Responsibilities

• Secure Constructs & Paved Paths: Design and ship the libraries, defaults, and workflows that make the secure way to build at Traversal the easiest way.

• Security Invariants & Guardrails: Define and implement controls that continuously verify security properties across our products and cloud infrastructure.

• Build Security into Products: Design and ship security capabilities in Traversal’s products that support enterprise security teams.

• Findings to Fixes: Discover issues, verify them, assess them, ship fixes with system owners, and add tests or controls that prevent recurrence.

• Security Architecture: Architect security systems and major components, defining the interfaces, invariants, and evolution paths that let them scale across SaaS and BYOC deployments.

• Delivery & Adoption: Lead multi-phase rollouts, migrations, and deprecations across teams with careful sequencing and de-risking, and land them with enablement and measurable success criteria.

• Operational Ownership: Ship operationally complete systems with monitoring, alert quality, runbooks, and safe rollout and upgrade paths; debug and resolve security issues in your area.

• Technical Direction: Set direction for scoped security domains, connect technical work to customer and business outcomes, and use results to shape the follow-up roadmap with product and engineering leadership.

• Mentorship & Leverage: Mentor engineers and emerging technical leaders, and create patterns, libraries, and reference implementations that let others extend your work without depending on you.

Requirements

• 4-6+ years building or securing production software or infrastructure at technically rigorous companies or teams, including sensitive, mission-critical systems.

• Proven ability to independently lead ambiguous, cross-team security projects from design through implementation, migration, and adoption, with minimal structure.

• Strong programming skills in a language such as Python, Rust, or Go and the ability to work effectively in an existing codebase.

• Hands-on depth in application security or cloud security, with working knowledge of the other, gained either in a security role or by owning security-critical systems as a software or infrastructure engineer.

• Technical depth in risk assessment. Looks at standards like NIST & SOC2 as a starting point, and not necessarily the right baseline.

• Practical understanding of authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, secrets, and common failure modes in distributed systems.

• Clear written communication and a collaborative approach to technical disagreements.

Nice to Have

• Experience with enterprise customer security requirements.

• Experience building on and securing infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and container orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes).

• Detection engineering, security telemetry, or automated control validation.

• Offensive testing experience paired with shipped remediations.

• Experience with applying formal methods for security.

You don’t need experience in every area above. We’re interested in what you’ve built, how you made decisions, and how your work changed the systems and teams around you.

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and additional benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this full-time, in-person role in New York is $240,000-$300,000, plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are based on location, level, and role. Individual compensation is determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

Why You Should Join Us

Traversal is a place to take on hard, meaningful problems with real ownership from day one. You’ll work alongside people who challenge you to grow, learn constantly, and help define a new category of infrastructure software. We think long term, move quickly, and hold a high bar without taking ourselves too seriously.

We offer competitive salary and equity packages, health insurance, fertility benefits, a great tech setup stipend and flexible time off. Plus in-office snacks, team happy hours and outings, an annual company offsite, and plenty of built in time to collaborate across teams.

Traversal is fully in-office, 5 days a week, based in New York near Madison Square Park. We have a collaborative, hard-working culture and are energized by building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.