Staff Security Engineer - AI

LinkedIn; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 152,000 - 248,000; Full time

Job summary

LinkedIn’s Platform & Product Security team seeks a Staff Security Engineer to tighten security across AI applications, infrastructure, and development workflows. You will research threats, lead models, and design secure-by-default frameworks while building scalable tooling to mitigate vulnerabilities at scale.

You will work with platform and ML teams to enforce secure AI tooling, guardrails, and policies across the lifecycle from data ingestion to inference, ensuring privacy, integrity, and

Qualifications

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Security, or related field, or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML or LLM security risks (prompt injection, data poisoning, provenance integrity).
• 5+ years in security engineering with deep knowledge of application security, authentication, cryptography, or supply chain security.
• 5+ years in threat modeling, design reviews, penetration testing, and vulnerability assessment.
• Experience with programming languages such as Java, GoLang or Python.
• Experience architecting or implementing tooling that detects and mitigates security vulnerabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute adoption of security controls across AI/ML infrastructure, including model scanning, model signing and provenance, and ML pipeline security (MLOps/MLSecOps)
• Architect and build security guardrails and paved roads for agentic workflows: hardening agent SDKs, tool access and permissioning, input/output validation, execution boundaries, sandboxing, and auditability of agent actions
• Build automation and red-team/detection tooling that continuously identifies, reproduces, and mitigates AI-specific vulnerabilities at scale; partner with Detection & Response on prompt/tool-call telemetry and AI-incident playbooks.
• Lead threat modeling and adversarial red-teaming of AI systems, and maintain a LinkedIn AI threat taxonomy mapped to industry standards. Partner with security and platform teams to embed the resulting threat models and risk assessments into AI platforms, developer tooling, and production services.
• Define AI security standards, reference architectures, and policies across model development, data ingestion, training, inference, and agentic systems; drive secure adoption of AI tooling (vendors, copilots, integrations), including data-sharing and sensitive-data-in-prompt boundaries.
• Drive cross-functional architecture and engineering decisions across platform engineering, security engineering, ML/AI teams, and product/DevEx to build developer platforms, AI systems, and infrastructure that are scalable, reliable, and secure by design.

Skills

AI Security

Security Assessment Methodologies

Security Architecture

Technical Leadership

Education

BA/BS Degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Security, or related field

Job description

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, built to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Our products help people make powerful connections, discover exciting opportunities, build necessary skills, and gain valuable insights every day. We're also committed to providing transformational opportunities for our own employees by investing in their growth. We aspire to create a culture that's built on trust, care, inclusion, and fun – where everyone can succeed.

Join us to transform the way the world works.

Job Description

At LinkedIn, our approach to flexible work is centered on trust and optimized for culture, connection, clarity, and the evolving needs of our business. The work location of this role is hybrid, meaning it will be performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team.

This location is hybrid in our Sunnyvale office location.

About the team

LinkedIn's members entrust us with their information every day and we take their security seriously. Our core value of putting our members first powers all the decisions we make, including how we manage and protect the data of our members and customers. Information Security at LinkedIn is dedicated to protecting and securing business-critical member data and company assets. Our core mission is to empower LinkedIn to create a secure and thriving platform for every member of the global workforce. The Product Security team strives to proactively safeguard our products, applications, and infrastructure by identifying, assessing, and mitigating security and privacy risks. We are dedicated to protecting our members by researching evolving threats and attack vectors, identifying vulnerabilities, and providing security consultation to minimize potential risks. We invest significantly in automation and focus on high impact engineering projects that detect security risks.

About the role

As a Staff Security Engineer on the Platform & Product Security team, you will strengthen the security posture of LinkedIn's AI applications, infrastructure, and development workflows — researching emerging threats, leading threat models, designing and implementing secure-by-default frameworks, and building scalable tooling to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities across the company.

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute adoption of security controls across AI/ML infrastructure, including model scanning, model signing and provenance, and ML pipeline security (MLOps/MLSecOps)
• Architect and build security guardrails and paved roads for agentic workflows: hardening agent SDKs, tool access and permissioning, input/output validation, execution boundaries, sandboxing, and auditability of agent actions
• Build automation and red-team/detection tooling that continuously identifies, reproduces, and mitigates AI-specific vulnerabilities at scale; partner with Detection & Response on prompt/tool-call telemetry and AI-incident playbooks.
• Lead threat modeling and adversarial red-teaming of AI systems, and maintain a LinkedIn AI threat taxonomy mapped to industry standards. Partner with security and platform teams to embed the resulting threat models and risk assessments into AI platforms, developer tooling, and production services.
• Define AI security standards, reference architectures, and policies across model development, data ingestion, training, inference, and agentic systems; drive secure adoption of AI tooling (vendors, copilots, integrations), including data-sharing and sensitive-data-in-prompt boundaries.
• Drive cross-functional architecture and engineering decisions across platform engineering, security engineering, ML/AI teams, and product/DevEx to build developer platforms, AI systems, and infrastructure that are scalable, reliable, and secure by design.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Security, or related technical field, or equivalent technical experience.
• Hands-on experience or working knowledge of AI/ML or LLM-application security risks (e.g., prompt injection, data poisoning, model/provenance integrity).
• 5+ years experience in security engineering and in-depth knowledge of application security, authentication and security protocols, cryptography, or supply chain security.
• 5+ Experience in various security assessment methodologies such as threat modeling, design reviews, penetration testing and vulnerability assessment.
• Experience with programming languages such as Java, GoLang or Python.
• Experience architecting or implementing tooling that detects and mitigates security vulnerabilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• BS and 8+ years of relevant work experience, MS and 7+ years of relevant work experience, or PhD and 4+ years of relevant work experience.
• 5+ years experience with programming languages such as Java, GoLang or Python.
• Experience securing agentic systems: sandboxing, tool permissioning, and runtime policy enforcement.
• Working knowledge of modern AI/ML stack: LLMs and foundation models, RAG architectures, agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain/LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen), and ML pipelines (training, evaluation, inference).
• Demonstrated ability to ramp up quickly on AI-specific threats.
• Ability to work across teams and communicate concisely and clearly to stakeholders.
• Experience with security research, bug bounty or CTF competitions.

Suggested Skills

• AI Security
• Security Assessment Methodologies
• Security Architecture
• Technical Leadership

You will Benefit from our Culture

We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families. That is why we offer generous health and wellness programs and time away for employees of all levels.

LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $152,000 - $248,000. Actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations.

The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For additional information, visit: https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits.

Additional Information

Equal Opportunity Statement

We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. LinkedIn considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

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Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to:

• Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
• Having interviews in an accessible location
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