Software Engineer, Security San Francisco

Exa; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare

Fertility benefits

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Exa, an applied AI lab in San Francisco, is hiring a Security Engineer to design and protect the systems powering our massive-scale web infrastructure.

You will build secure infrastructure, manage cloud security (AWS), IAM, CI/CD security, secrets and key lifecycles, and drive compliance (HIPAA, SOC 2). This role emphasizes hardening, incident readiness, and secure operation as we scale.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience in building and maintaining secure infrastructure.
• Familiar with cloud security fundamentals, multi-account AWS, IAM design, secure CI/CD pipelines.
• Expert in secrets management, key management, and certificate lifecycles.
• Experience owning compliance efforts (HIPAA, SOC 2, etc.).
• Skilled in security hardening, VPNs, dev servers and related tooling.
• Vigilant about vulnerabilities and secure operation with new technologies.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement security controls for Exa's web-scale systems.
• Lead incident response, detection, and post-mortem processes.
• Monitor and improve security posture across distributed services and workloads.

Skills

Secure infra

Cloud security

IAM & CI/CD

Secrets management

Compliance (HIPAA/SOC2)

Security hardening

Threat detection

Tools

AWS

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen. We build massive-scale infra to crawl the entire web, train state-of-the-art embedding models to process it, and design super high performant vector databases to retrieve over it. We now power search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and over 400,000 developers and have raised $350m from Lightspeed, Benchmark, and a16z.

Our ultimate goal is to build perfect search over all the world’s information, far beyond Google. If you want to build massive-scale ML systems that will define the way the new AI world consumes information, this is the place for you.

We are hiring a Security Engineer to build the protective shield for all of Exa’s systems. These systems include: processing web scale data, indexing hundreds of billions of pages, training foundational models on TBs of data, serving thousands of enterprise customers from our endpoints. You will be critical in making Exa run securely while ensuring our shipping velocity.

Desired Experience

• You have hands-on experience in building and maintaining secure infrastructure

• You know your way around cloud security fundamentals, including multi-account AWS permissions and architectures, IAM design, secure CI/CD pipelines

• You are fluent in secrets management, key management, and certificate lifecycles (rotation, revocation, automation)

• You have owned compliance efforts such as HIPPA, SOC2, etc.

• You are comfortable with security hardening and any other details needed to make engineering systems run smoothly (VPN, development servers, etc.)

• You are super vigilant about vulnerabilities, potential attacks, and abuse, and constantly think about how to operate securely with the introduction of new technologies (OS-level, AI coding agents, etc.)

Example Projects

• Build a secrets management and rotation system used across distributed services, training jobs, and GPU clusters without impacting developer velocity

• Build monitoring and alerting for anomalous behavior across APIs, internal services, and customer usage

• Create security incident response playbooks and lead incident handling, from detection to post-mortem

This is an in-person opportunity in San Francisco. We're happy to sponsor international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3). In addition to premium healthcare benefits (medical, dental, vision), we also offer fertility benefits and a monthly wellness stipend to all of our employees.

Exa is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related conditions, criminal histories consistent with applicable law, or any other basis protected by applicable law.