Staff Security Architect

Bridgewater Associates Referrals; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 450,000 - 600,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive benefits package

Professional development opportunities

Job summary

A leading asset management firm in New York seeks a senior AI security architect to modernize security operations and embed within investment teams for AI security. The ideal candidate has over 10 years of experience in software or security engineering with a strong focus on AI/ML systems and cloud-native applications. Responsibilities include designing AI security agents, creating secure deployment architectures, and influencing development practices for security. Competitive compensation range between $450,000 and $600,000 plus benefits.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software or security engineering.
• 3+ years building/deploying AI/ML systems.
• Experience securing cloud-native applications.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement AI agents for security.
• Create secure deployment architectures for AI agents.
• Conduct security architecture reviews of agent systems.

Skills

AI Security Expertise

Software Engineering

Security Engineering

Python

TypeScript

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Bridgewater Associates Overview

Bridgewater Associates is a premier asset management firm, focused on delivering unique insight and partnership for the most sophisticated global institutional investors.

Our investment process is driven by a tireless pursuit to understand how the world’s markets and economies work — using cutting edge technology to validate and execute on timeless and universal investment principles.

Our Culture

Our culture is tied to our mission, which is to understand how the world’s markets and economies work. This requires an extraordinary team, defined by the best individuals and the best portfolio of people, operating in an idea meritocracy. In this, we are uncompromising on our shared values of excellence, truth, integrity, humility, and courage. Our aspiration of a vibrant idea meritocracy requires diversity of thought — this comes from diversity of background, identity, experience and so much more. We pursue inclusion because it’s how we unlock the power of that diversity and make sure the best ideas get heard; equity ensures our structures are fair and reinforcing of our commitment to merit. To sustain this way of being, we invest in meaningful work and meaningful relationships – the purpose and joy that comes from tackling something challenging and worthy, alongside people who make us better versions of ourselves.

About the Security Department

The Security Department’s mission is to protect Bridgewater. We secure the investment departments, which manage assets for global institutional clients, as well as all other business operations. We constantly evolve our cyber, physical, and staff security practices to meet business needs and stay ahead of the changing threat landscape.

AI agents are no longer experimental. They are becoming infrastructure. Every team at Bridgewater — from investment research to technology to operations — is exploring or deploying agentic workflows. The Security Department needs someone who doesn’t just understand this shift, but leads it: someone who can build AI agents that transform security operations and simultaneously serve as the firm’s expert on how to deploy agents safely everywhere else.

About Your Role

This person needs to know how to build and how to protect. We’re not looking for someone who reviews architectures from the sideline. We need someone in the arena — writing agents, shipping code, deploying guardrails, and setting the standard for how an entire firm adopts AI securely.

This is a 50/50 role with two equally critical mandates:

PILLAR 1 (50%) — AI Thought Leader in Security: Build It

You will be the hands‑on AI leader inside the Security Department, a builder who ships. You will design and implement AI agents that modernize security operations in an AI‑native way: automating threat detection, vulnerability triage, incident response, compliance monitoring, and developer security tooling. You will set the vision for what a modern, agent‑powered security organization looks like and then build it yourself.

• Build Security Operations Agents: Design, develop, and deploy autonomous agents for threat detection, alert triage, vulnerability management, and incident response — to transform the way those teams operate.
• Modernize Workflows AI‑Natively: Reimagine existing security processes through the lens of agentic AI. Replace manual runbooks with intelligent agents that reason, act, and elevate. Build agent‑powered security copilots for engineering teams that perform real‑time code review, suggest secure patterns, and catch vulnerabilities before they ship.
• Own the Security AI Stack: Evaluate, select, and implement the right mix of frameworks, orchestration tools, and infrastructure for the department’s agent platform. You should have strong opinions — backed by hands‑on experience — on LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, Semantic Kernel, Dify, n8n, and the broader ecosystem.
• Governance and framework Automation: Build agents that continuously validate configurations, access policies, and data handling against regulatory and internal frameworks of the agents deployed by our investment teams.
• Be the agentic security thought leader: Be the person the department looks to for what’s possible. Stay deeply current on the AI landscape — enterprise and open‑source — and translate that knowledge into real capability.

PILLAR 2 (50%) — Forward‑Deployed AI Security Architect: Protect It

Equally important — if not more important — you will embed directly with Bridgewater’s technology and investment teams as they build and deploy their own AI agents. You are the security expert who sits shoulder‑to‑shoulder with engineers and researchers, helping them ship agentic workflows that are secure by design. This is not a gate‑keeping role. This is a partnership role where you bring deep architectural expertise to the teams building the future of the firm.

• Deep Architecture & Sandboxing: Design secure deployment architectures for AI agents across the firm. Define sandboxing strategies, execution boundaries, network isolation, and blast‑radius controls that let teams move fast without exposing the organization to unacceptable risk.
• Identity & Authorization for Agents: Architect identity strategies for a world where agents act on behalf of humans. Define how agents authenticate, what permissions they hold, how credentials are scoped and rotated, and how to enforce least‑privilege across multi‑agent systems and MCP server integrations.
• AI Supply Chain Security: Own the security posture of the AI supply chain end to end. Evaluate the security of agent frameworks, MCP servers, skills/plugins, model providers, embedding pipelines, vector databases, and every dependency in between. Understand the attack surface of tools like LangGraph, LangFlow, Dify, n8n, Open Interpreter, Claude Code, Cursor, and similar agentic development environments.
• Prompt Injection & Model Manipulation Defense: Be the firm’s leading expert on prompt injection, jailbreaking, data poisoning, indirect injection via tool outputs, and agent manipulation attacks. Design and deploy runtime defenses using tools like NeMo Guardrails, LlamaFirewall, LLM Guard, OpenGuardrails, Guardrails AI, and custom detection layers.
• Runtime Safety & Governance: Build monitoring, kill switches, escalation triggers, and anomaly detection for AI agents in production. Design human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints calibrated to risk tolerance and action severity. Implement policy‑as‑code that governs agent behavior, tool access, data exposure, and output validation.
• Secure Agent‑to‑Agent Communication: Architect trust boundaries and communication protocols for multi‑agent systems — ensuring orchestration, tool use, and data sharing follow least‑privilege principles and are resilient to injection and manipulation.
• Security Reviews & Red Teaming: Conduct deep‑dive security architecture reviews of agentic systems before they go to production. Red‑team LLM integrations and agent workflows to find weaknesses before adversaries do.

What We Expect

You need to have a deep understanding and pulse of the AI market — both enterprise and open‑source. This space moves weekly. We need someone who’s already in it, not someone planning to catch up.

We expect this person to be fluent across the full AI stack. Not at a surface level — at the level of someone who has built with these tools, broken them, and understands their security implications from the inside.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, security engineering or application security with demonstrated impact at a senior or staff level.
• 3+ years of hands‑on experience building, deploying, or securing AI/ML systems, including LLM‑based applications and agentic workflows.
• Proven track record of building production‑grade AI agents or agent‑powered tools — not just evaluating or advising on them.
• Deep, current knowledge of the AI agent ecosystem across enterprise and open‑source: frameworks, orchestration tools, model providers, RAG infrastructure, and developer tooling.
• Demonstrated expertise in AI‑specific security threats, including prompt injection defense, agent sandboxing, identity for autonomous systems, and supply‑chain security for AI toolchains.
• Experience securing cloud‑native applications and infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) with strong understanding of identity, networking, and data protection.
• Expert in Python and/or TypeScript with the ability to build production‑grade security tooling, agents, and automation.
• Proven ability to work as an embedded partner with engineering and research teams — influencing through expertise and trust, not mandates.
• Exceptional communication skills: able to translate complex AI security concepts into clear, actionable guidance for engineers, researchers, and leadership.
• Strong judgment in balancing security risk, business velocity, and the realities of a fast‑moving AI landscape.

Preferred Qualifications

• Contributions to open‑source AI security projects or frameworks.
• Background in financial services or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience red‑teaming LLMs and agentic systems in adversarial settings.
• Familiarity with AI observability and tracing tools (LangSmith, Langfuse, Helicone, Arize) for monitoring agent behavior in production.

Physical Requirements

This role is offered as hybrid with options to work out of our NYC or CT offices.

Compensation

The wage range for this role is $450,000 – $600,000 inclusive of base salary and discretionary bonus. The expected base salary for this role is between 65–75% of this wage range.

Why Choose Bridgewater?

It takes all types to make Bridgewater great. We seek a diverse group of innovative thinkers and push them to engage in rigorous and thoughtful inquiry. We develop people through an honest examination of their abilities and performance, enabling personal growth and professional development. We strive to provide employees with opportunities that will challenge them and unlock their potential.

One of our core priorities at Bridgewater is to enable our employees to build a great life and career, and we believe our benefits are an important extension of that philosophy. As such, currently Bridgewater offers a competitive suite of benefits.

Bridgewater reserves the right to change its current benefits program at any time, in a manner that is consistent with applicable federal and state regulations. This job description is not a contract and confers no contractual rights, privileges, or benefits on any applicant or potential applicant. Bridgewater has the right to change any and all terms of this job description, including, but not limited to, job responsibilities, qualifications and benefits. Nothing in this job description constitutes an offer or guarantee of employment. Please note that we do not provide immigration sponsorship for this position.

Bridgewater Associates, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer