Staff/Lead Application Security Engineer

Beacon; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon is seeking its first dedicated Application Security Engineer to set the strategy for product security and begin building a comprehensive program across Beacon and portfolio companies. You will embed with engineering teams, own the technical roadmap for product security, and influence design reviews and planning at Beacon HQ or portfolio sites.

You will lead secure design, threat modeling, and security architecture reviews, and drive standards for authentication, authorization, encryption,

Qualifications

• Expert knowledge of web security and API security.
• Experience designing authentication and authorization systems (RBAC/ABAC).
• Applied cryptography fundamentals for secure data in transit and at rest.
• Experience securing cloud environments and containerized workloads.
• Ability to ship production code and author fixes, not only specify them.

Responsibilities

• Lead threat modeling and security architecture reviews for new products and platforms.
• Define standards for authentication, authorization, encryption, and tenant isolation.
• Own product security review for acquisitions and cloud environments; establish posture and remediation path.
• Perform secure code reviews focused on authorization and business logic flaws.
• Manage vulnerability program end-to-end, including SLAs and remediation with engineering teams.
• Build tooling and CI/CD integration for SAST, DAST, SCA, and secrets scanning.

Skills

Web security

API security

Identity design

Authentication

Authorization

RBAC/ABAC

Applied cryptography

Cloud security

Container security

Secure coding

Job description

The role

You will be Beacon's first dedicated application security engineer. You will set the strategy for product security and start to build the program. Beacon's application security surface spans both Beacon's own engineering and our portfolio companies' products, each independently built with its own stack and engineering team. You will embed with the teams that own the code, whether at Beacon HQ or within a portfolio company, working inside their design reviews and planning, and own the technical roadmap for product security as Beacon grows.

What Application Security owns

This is the full remit of Application Security at Beacon. It is more than one person can cover at once. As the first member of the team, you will stand up the essentials, prioritize the highest-leverage work first, and build the rest into a roadmap.

Secure design and architecture: lead threat modeling and security architecture review for new product work and platform initiatives, and define standards for authentication, authorization, encryption, and tenant isolation.

Acquisition assessment: own the product security review of newly acquired codebases and cloud environments, establishing baseline posture, material risk, and the remediation path.

Code and security review: perform secure code review, targeting authorization and business logic flaws that automated tooling does not catch. Identify and manage the external partner who runs penetration testing against our products and infrastructure, and drive remediation of what they find.

AI security: assess AI features across our products, including agent architectures, model and tool access, delegated credentials, and the data reachable through them.

Vulnerability management: own the end-to-end program, including intake, severity, prioritization, remediation SLAs, and reporting, and drive fixes through engineering teams in a way they can sustain.

Tooling and automation: own the standard for SAST, DAST, SCA, and secrets scanning, and its integration into CI/CD across the portfolio. Build the automation that lets one person cover a multi-team portfolio, including routine fix PRs, dependency remediation, and findings routing. Own the security of any internal tools you build, including their access to credentials, source code, and production systems.

Enablement: write the secure coding standards and training that engineering teams consult before they build.

Incident response: serve as the product security expert during incidents, from investigation through remediation and postmortem.

Compliance partnership: work with GRC to produce the evidence audit and customer security review require, without letting compliance drive the security roadmap.

What we are looking for

Would rather build a system that finds every instance of a bug than fix one at a time. Already uses AI as part of how you work, with real opinions on where it helps and where it doesn't, including judgment on when to build tooling versus buy it. Can set architecture and standards across many codebases, not just review one at a time. Ships production code yourself. You should be able to author a fix, not only specify it. Expert knowledge of web and API security, identity and access design (authentication, authorization, RBAC/ABAC), and applied cryptography. Experience securing applications in cloud environments and containerized workloads. A track record of driving security work to completion in engineering organizations outside your reporting line.

Our Values at Beacon Software

Humility: We acknowledge that the path to getting to the right answer involves being wrong along the way. We have strong beliefs which are weakly held. We actively seek new ideas and believe we can learn from anyone at any time.

Honesty: We are truth seeking in our approach to business problems. Business is a repeat game and we believe that human relationships generate alpha. We understand that trust is earned over a lifetime and can be lost in an instant.

Hunger: We play to win. We hold ourselves to high standards and will not be outworked. We take pride in having a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves, each other, our partners, and our customers. We believe to whom much is given much is expected.

Horizon: We seek to build a generational software company. This will take decades. We manage our expectations and those of our partners to take advantage of the 8th wonder of the world - compounding growth.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process

To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Beacon Software uses Artificial Intelligence and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role. AI does not make hiring decisions: Every application is reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.