Staff Security Engineer — AI-Native AppSec & Attacks

Alkonos, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Wakefield, a security-focused applied research lab in San Francisco, seeks an experienced security engineer to shape offensive and defensive testing with our agents and ensure customer data safety.

On the offensive side, you will shape attack classes and report bugs; on the defensive side, you will ensure tests stay within approved scopes and prioritize data protection. We sponsor visas and offer meaningful equity along with a competitive salary.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of offensive security, product security or security engineering experience, or equivalent depth from research, CTFs, bug bounties or personal projects
• Experience at a fast-growing startup
• You've found and reported real vulnerabilities in real applications
• You've designed and built security systems, not just audited them
• Strong fundamentals: web application security, identity and access, cloud security, networking
• You use coding agents every day and still understand every line you ship
• You break and build things for fun because you genuinely care about how systems fail

Responsibilities

• Teaching agents new classes of attack: broken access control, business logic, authentication, and privilege escalation across tenants.
• Reproducing hard findings by hand, and writing up the ones that need a person's judgment.
• Scope enforcement: agents touch only approved targets, through one path, with a full record of every request.
• Identity and credentials for agents: short-lived and scoped, so agents never hold raw secrets.
• Defenses against prompt injection and tool misuse from the applications our agents test.
• Our SOC 2 program and the security reviews our customers put us through.

Skills

Offensive security

Security engineering

Product security

Web security fundamentals

Identity and access

Cloud security

Coding agents

Job description

Wakefield, a security-focused applied research lab in San Francisco, seeks an experienced security engineer to shape offensive and defensive testing with our agents and ensure customer data safety.

On the offensive side, you will shape attack classes and report bugs; on the defensive side, you will ensure tests stay within approved scopes and prioritize data protection. We sponsor visas and offer meaningful equity along with a competitive salary.