Security Lead: AI Product & Infrastructure

River AI; Iowa; On-site; USD 200,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Relocation assistance

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

River AI is seeking a deeply technical Security lead to build and lead security from the ground up. As our first security hire, you will define how we protect research infrastructure, model weights, corporate assets, and the customer-facing platform—without slowing frontier AI development.

This role blends hands-on engineering leadership with program development and strategic vision. You will establish capabilities across cybersecurity, detection and response, product security, and operational

Qualifications

• 10+ years in security with hands-on tech company experience.
• First security executive in high-velocity environment.
• Deep expertise across multiple security domains including incident response and cloud security.
• Experience securing large-scale cloud-native distributed systems and HPC clusters.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale end-to-end security operations for product and infrastructure.
• Protect proprietary model weights, data pipelines, research clusters, and source code.
• Design lightweight, automated security controls and secure-by-default infrastructure for researchers.
• Own IT, identity and access management, and privacy engineering integration.
• Drive security research and tooling initiatives to advance defensive capabilities.
• Own the trust narrative with customers and regulators; drive SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP roadmaps.

Skills

Security leadership

AI security

Cloud-native security

Incident response

Security tooling

Cross-functional collaboration

Secure software development

Threat modeling

Forensics

Policy & governance

Job description

River AI is seeking a deeply technical Security lead to build and lead security from the ground up. As our first security hire, you will define how we protect research infrastructure, model weights, corporate assets, and the customer-facing platform—without slowing frontier AI development.

This role blends hands-on engineering leadership with program development and strategic vision. You will establish capabilities across cybersecurity, detection and response, product security, and operational