Director of Product Security

Candescent is a forward-thinking technology company transforming how financial institutions deliver Intelligent Banking experiences. We unite digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions that power and connect digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions—creating seamless engagement across digital, remote, and in-person channels.

Our Experience-Led, Intelligence-Driven approach combines human-centered design with data, automation, and cloud-based innovation. Built on an API-first architecture, our extensible ecosystem enables institutions to adapt quickly, integrate easily, and unlock new opportunities for growth—turning every customer interaction into a moment of clarity, confidence, and connection.

The Executive Director of Product Security at Candescent will lead the strategic direction, development, and execution of the enterprise-wide product and application security program with specialized focus on Candescent’s SaaS products serving regulated enterprises.

This role is responsible for embedding security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and AI development lifecycle (AIDLC), partnering with engineering, product data science, AI/ML engineering, and infrastructure teams to ensure secure software design, development, and deployment of Candescent applications. The ideal candidate will be a visionary leader with deep technical expertise in securing software development life cycles, shift-left security, AI/ML application security, strong business acumen, regulatory compliance awareness, and a proven track record of building and scaling secure development practices in complex Saas and AI-driven environments.

Key Responsibilities and Deliverables Strategic Leadership Define and drive the product, application and AI/ML security strategy aligned with Candescent’s business and risk objectives for regulated enterprise clients.

Lead the development and execution of secure SDLC and AI development lifecycle (AIDLC) practices across all engineering and data science teams.

Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on application security risks, AI/ML security risks, platform security, model governance, trends, and mitigation strategies.

Participate in the establishment of AI security governance frameworks that meet regulatory requirements (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001).Develop security strategies for supply chain, third-party integrations, LLM/GenAI implementations, and SBOM generation (Software Bill of Materials).Program Development & Execution Build and mature the application security program, including threat modeling, secure coding, code reviews, and security testing across traditional applications and AI/ML systems.

Develop and maintain security standards, policies, and guidelines for secure application development, secure code repository controls, and associated AI model integration.

Oversee the integration of security tools (SAST, DAST, SCA, IAST, RASP) and AI security tools (model scanning, adversarial testing, data poisoning detection, model monitoring) into CI/CD and ML pipelines.

Implement industry leading Dev Sec Ops  practices and secure AI pipeline architectures.

Establish data governance and privacy controls for development and training data, including sensitive data handling and data lineage tracking.

Collaboration & Enablement Partner with Information Security, Dev Ops, Engineering, Data Science, ML Engineering, and Product teams to ensure security is embedded early and continuously.

Lead security champions programs for developer and data scientist training initiatives to foster a security-first culture with security awareness.

Collaborate with GRC, Risk, and Compliance teams to ensure regulatory and policy alignment specific to regulations and industry-specific requirements that apply to product and application development (HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, AI, etc....).Work closely with customer-facing teams to address client product security requirements and regulatory audit needs.

Partner with legal and compliance teams on relevant product security and AI compliance.

Risk Management & Incident Response Identify and prioritize application and AI security risks…