Software Engineer, Security

Surge AI; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Surge AI, based in San Francisco and New York, seeks a senior security engineer to own security end-to-end across product, infrastructure, and corporate systems. This hands-on role fixes issues directly and drives security culture across the company.

You'll work with engineers and researchers from leading tech labs, shaping security practices as Surge scales its AI platform globally. Remote-friendly with travel for in-person collaboration.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• Strong software engineering and system design skills.
• Security across product, infrastructure and corporate domains.
• Generalist mindset with ownership of multiple areas.
• Early startup experience as one of the first security hires.
• Comfort with ambiguity and self-driven problem solving.
• Experience with Python or Ruby on Rails is a plus.
• CS degree or equivalent STEM background.

Responsibilities

• Fix authentication and authorization issues across the platform.
• Improve how we manage keys and secrets across projects.
• Harden internal tooling and bring off-band tools safely into the platform.
• Refactor permissioning and pull sensitive capabilities from admin systems.
• Contribute to core backend engineering work alongside the team.
• Own security reviews, incident response, and tooling across product, infrastructure, and corporate.

Skills

Security engineering

Software engineering

Cross-domain security

Generalist

Startup experience

Ambiguity tolerance

Python

Ruby on Rails

Education

CS degree or STEM

Tools

Python

Ruby on Rails

Job description

Our mission is to raise AGI with the richness of human intelligence: curious, witty, imaginative, and full of unexpected brilliance.

Surge was founded by engineers and researchers who dreamed of building the next generation AI. We're building a platform that powers the most powerful models in the world in partnership with companies like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

At Surge, we believe the path to AGI isn't just about scaling compute. It's about embracing the unlimited ceiling of human intelligence and creativity in the data that shapes these systems. Our platform combines elite human expertise with cutting-edge tools for scalable oversight, from building rich RL environments to conducting rigorous evaluations that go beyond benchmarks. We've run a profitable business from day one without raising venture funding.

The Role

This is a senior, hands-on role for engineers who want to own security end to end.

This isn't an advisory role. You'll be an engineer on the team who owns security across the whole company, from product and infrastructure to corporate and IT, and you'll fix problems directly rather than surfacing them and handing them off. You'll be a pivotal part of an engineering team that takes security seriously and fixes things with you rather than treating it as someone else's job.

We are a small, dynamic team operating at the center of the AI ecosystem. The way security gets done is changing because of AI, and as a company that works with every major AI lab, we're at the frontier of it. You'll work closely with engineers and researchers from the top technology companies in the world.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of experience building and shipping production software (5+ with exceptional experience)
• Strong software engineering skills: you'll go through the same coding and system design bar as our engineers
• Competence across all three of product, infrastructure, and corporate security
• A generalist who's comfortable owning a little bit of everything rather than a narrow slice
• Early-stage startup experience, ideally as one of the first security hires at a company
• A builder's instinct for ambiguity: comfortable operating without a fixed roadmap or product managers, and you fix problems yourself instead of throwing them over the fence
• Experience with Python or Ruby on Rails a plus
• CS degree from a top school or equivalent STEM background

What You'll Do

• Fix authentication and authorization issues across the platform
• Improve how we manage keys and secrets across projects
• Harden internal tooling and bring off-band tools built by other teams safely into the platform
• Refactor permissioning and pull sensitive capabilities out of our admin systems
• Contribute to core backend engineering work alongside the engineering team
• Own security reviews, incident response, and tooling, flexing across product, infrastructure, and corporate as the business needs

Location

We're based in San Francisco and New York and would love for you to be too. If you're a great fit elsewhere, we're open to remote, with some travel to spend time in person with the engineers you'll work with.