Sr Automation & Intelligence Tools Engineer, SEAR

Socket.dev; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is seeking a senior engineer to lead automation and AI-assisted workflows for security hardening across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. You’ll design harnesses, infrastructure, and developer tooling that enable trustworthy, scalable tooling for engineers building security-critical features.

You will shape how AI-native development is applied to security work, determining where agents speed us up and where they must be cautious, while collaborating with SEAR and OS teams to

Qualifications

• Strong programming skills in Swift, Objective-C, or Python with a track record of building tools, frameworks, or infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
• Experience designing and deploying automated verification at scale, including harnesses and CI systems.
• Real fluency with AI-assisted development using LLMs, coding agents, or tooling you’ve built to increase productivity and explainable results.
• Owned an ambiguous technical problem crossing team boundaries and driven it to a landed outcome.
• Able to explain technical trade-offs clearly to influence partner teams.

Responsibilities

• Design the automation harnesses, infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows to verify security-critical code across OS components.
• Decide where automation adds value and build it to scale with the team’s needs.
• Own the approach to proving security claims without degrading user experience.
• Explore what AI-native development looks like on a security team and where AI adds real speed without compromising trust.

Skills

Swift

Objective-C

Python

AI-assisted development

Automation tooling

Tools

XCTest

Xcode

CI/CD pipelines

LLM tooling

Job description

SPEAR is a team of engineers working on security hardening across all of Apple's operating systems. We work in a lot of different codebases, at every layer of the stack, on features that ship to over a billion people without getting in their way. We're looking for a senior engineer to build the automation and intelligence tooling that lets us ship that work with confidence. You'll design the harnesses, infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows that make correctness verifiable across iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. Help us accelerate our security hardening work with the AI tooling to match its scale.

Description

You'll join a multi-functional team covering every layer of the operating system - from apps to the kernel - working directly with feature engineers in SEAR and across the wider OS organization. Day to day, you'll decide where automation is worth building, then build it. You own the question of how this team proves that security-critical code does what it claims, without degrading the experience for our customers. You'll also help us work out what AI-native development looks like on a security team: where agents genuinely speed us up, and where we can't trust them yet.

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong programming skills in Swift, Objective-C, or Python, with a track record of building tools, frameworks, or infrastructure that other engineers depend on.
• Experience designing and deploying automated verification at scale, including harnesses and CI systems.
• Real fluency with AI-assisted development. You use LLMs, coding agents, or tooling you've built yourself to get substantially more done, and you can explain how.
• You've owned an ambiguous technical problem that crossed team boundaries and driven it to something that actually landed.
• You can explain a technical trade-off clearly enough to change a partner team's mind.

Preferred Qualifications

• You've built agentic or LLM-backed developer tooling, such as evals, harnesses, MCP servers, or code-generation pipelines, and you have opinions about where it holds up and where it falls over.
• Familiarity with XCTest, Xcode, and working in large shared codebases.
• Background in security, systems-level, or platform software.
• Experience setting test strategy: assessing risk, deciding what's worth covering, triaging and prioritizing.
• Curiosity about how systems work end to end, and the patience to find out.