Staff AI Security Engineer — Secure AI Platform Architect

Ridgeline, Inc.; San Ramon (CA); On-site; USD 205,000 - 256,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited vacation

Education & wellness reimbursements

Zero-cost employee insurance

Stock options

Job summary

Ridgeline, Inc. is seeking a Staff AI Security Engineer to shape secure AI platforms and guardrails for the business. You will architect secure-by-default AI platforms, lead on AI/LLM threat security, and partner with engineering to embed security into how AI is built and used.

This role requires deep security expertise, hands-on AI experience, and a bias toward action. Ridgeline offers a fast-growing, people-first culture with generous benefits and stock options.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in application security, cloud security, or security-focused software engineering.
• Demonstrated depth in at least one of: secure code review and product security; cloud and infrastructure security (AWS, IAM, guardrails, policy-as-code); or building production software with a strong security focus.
• Advanced proficiency in at least one high-level language (Python strongly preferred; Kotlin or TypeScript a plus).
• Hands-on, daily use of AI/LLM tooling, the ability to engineer systems that use it, and the judgment to validate AI output for correctness and risk.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the platforms, guardrails, and reusable frameworks that let Ridgeline adopt AI safely at scale.
• Find and mitigate the AI-specific risks that generic tooling misses: prompt injection, model input/output sanitization, data leakage, and trust-boundary violations across AI-powered features and agents.
• Secure agentic and tool-use systems, including function/tool calling and MCP server integrations, with clear trust boundaries and least-privilege patterns for AI agents.
• Establish and operate guardrails for internal AI developer tooling that let engineering move fast without sacrificing security.
• Threat model new AI features and infrastructure to define security requirements before they are built, partnering with engineering and product teams.
• Build AI-augmented security tooling and pipelines that extend the team's capacity while keeping false positives low.
• Set organizational standards for responsible and secure AI use, risk acceptance, and model and vendor evaluation.
• Influence AI security decisions across engineering organizations, earning design input from Staff+ engineers through technical credibility.

Skills

Application security

Cloud security

AI security

Python

Kotlin/TypeScript

Tools

None

Job description

Ridgeline, Inc. is seeking a Staff AI Security Engineer to shape secure AI platforms and guardrails for the business. You will architect secure-by-default AI platforms, lead on AI/LLM threat security, and partner with engineering to embed security into how AI is built and used.

This role requires deep security expertise, hands-on AI experience, and a bias toward action. Ridgeline offers a fast-growing, people-first culture with generous benefits and stock options.