Senior Security Engineer

Cerebras; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 244,000 - 292,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading FinTech startup in San Francisco is seeking an experienced Security Engineer to safeguard customer data and infrastructure. You will design and maintain secure cloud systems, own the security posture of AWS services, and lead initiatives for secure software delivery. With a strong emphasis on ownership and innovation, we seek candidates who thrive in a dynamic environment. Ideal applicants have over 5 years in security engineering, particularly in AWS and infrastructure-as-code, and enjoy building internal tooling.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in security engineering with meaningful experience in cloud-native environments (AWS).
• Hands-on with infrastructure-as-code security.
• Strong command of AWS security primitives.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain secure infrastructure patterns.
• Own our cloud security posture across AWS.
• Participate in incident response and postmortems.

Skills

Security engineering

Cloud-native environments (AWS)

Infrastructure-as-code security

Scripting or programming languages (Python, Go, Ruby)

Data security expertise

Tools

Pulumi

Terraform

CSPM tooling

Job description

Kikoff: A FinTech Unicorn Powering Financial Progress with AI
At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth FinTech unicorn serving millions of people, many of whom are building credit or navigating life paycheck to paycheck. With innovative technology and AI, we simplify credit building, reduce debt, and expand access to financial opportunities to those who need them the most. Founded in 2019, Kikoff is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier VC investors and NBA star Stephen Curry.

Why Kikoff:

This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.

About the Role

This is a mission-critical role at the heart of how Kikoff protects millions of customers and their financial data. You'll own a wide mandate — from securing our cloud infrastructure and developer workflows to hardening our software supply chain and protecting how data moves across our stack. This isn't a compliance checkbox role. You'll have real ownership, and the work you do will be felt by every engineer at Kikoff and every customer we serve.

In This Role, You Will

Build & Secure

• Design and maintain secure‑by‑default infrastructure patterns — IaC modules, container configurations, IAM policy baselines, and secrets management — so the secure path is the easy path for developers
• Own our cloud security posture across AWS: continuous coverage, guardrails, drift detection, and remediation workflows
• Harden our CI/CD pipelines and lead our software supply chain security strategy, including dependency scanning, artifact signing, and pipeline integrity

Protect Data

• Own security across our data infrastructure — classification, access controls, encryption, and securing data flows across cloud storage and internal pipelines
• Build detection and audit logging capabilities that give us visibility at scale
• Partner with product and platform engineers to embed security into the development lifecycle through code review, threat modeling, and reusable secure patterns
• Build internal tooling that scales security and our engineering teams
• Be the person engineers come to for a clear, practical answers

Improve & Respond

• Participate in incident response and postmortems
• Track and drive remediation of vulnerabilities across infrastructure and applications
• Help shape our security program as an early, senior hire on the team

Qualifications

• 5+ years in security engineering with meaningful experience in cloud‑native environments (AWS strongly preferred)
• Hands‑on with infrastructure‑as‑code security — you've written and reviewed Pulumi or Terraform and know where things go wrong
• Strong command of AWS security primitives
• Experience securing containerized workloads
• Fluency in at least one scripting or programming language for automation (Python, Go, Ruby, or similar)
• Comfortable in a regulated environment — you've worked through PCI‑DSS, SOC 2, or similar
• Experience with industry leading CNAPP or CSPM tooling
• Supply chain security depth: dependency confusion mitigations, artifact provenance.
• Data security expertise — tokenization, column‑level access controls, audit logging at scale
• Fintech or consumer financial services background
• You've built internal security tooling from scratch, not just deployed vendor products

What Good Looks Like

You think in defaults, not policies. You'd rather fix the infrastructure module than write a runbook. You're comfortable telling an engineer "here's the secure version, just use this" — and they actually do.

Base Range

$244,000 - $292,000 USD

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.