AI Security & Control Engineer

THE OPPORTUNITY

We are building Watcher, a coding agent security product. We are looking for a security & control expert to help us design better threat models and control protocols against AI adversaries, and improve the effectiveness and security of Watcher.

A security & control expert embedded in the product team with three functions:

This is truly a “start‑up role” in the sense that you have many responsibilities and have significant say in shaping the direction of the role. This is an individual contributor role but could lead to management responsibilities eventually, if desired.

• Develop threat models for coding agents under the assumption that they could be misaligned or compromised. This includes near‑term threats like AI agents leaking private internal data and long‑term threats like agents sabotaging safety research.
• Treat coding agents through the lens of insider risk: they have credentials, access to code, network access, and the ability to execute arbitrary actions, just like a malicious insider would.
• Map out kill chains and attack progressions similar to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, adapted for agentic AI.
• Build and maintain our “coding agent security levels” which define what level of robustness Watcher provides against different categories of failure modes. These levels should be concrete, testable, and usable both internally (to guide product priorities) and externally (to communicate our security posture to customers).

• Maintain our library of coding agent failure modes and keep it comprehensive, accurate, and current.
• Stay up to date with the academic and industry literature on coding agent security, AI security, and adjacent fields (prompt injection, deception, accidental security implications, supply chain attacks on AI systems, etc.).

• Design realistic attack trajectories and example exploits for monitor development and backtesting, work with the research team to ensure monitors are trained and evaluated against credible adversarial behavior.

• Serve as security adjudicator for flagged trajectories. When monitors flag ambiguous agent behavior, determine whether it represents a genuine attack, a benign‑but‑unusual workflow, or needs deeper investigation, and feed those judgments back into monitor improvement.

• Red‑team and improve Watcher's monitors and policies, document findings, and feed them into product improvement.
• Work with the technical research staff to build adversarial test suites into the backtesting pipeline.

• Understand which failure modes are the biggest problems and prioritise systematically what is most useful to solve for security buyers.

• Join customer/prospect calls to understand security needs firsthand and map them onto the threat models and library of failure modes.
• Maintain awareness of how enterprises currently secure coding agents (or don’t), what tools they use (SIEM, DLP, CSPM), and how Watcher fits into their existing stack.

• Own security questionnaire responses, product security whitepapers, and support for customer pen‑tests.
• Own technical content of customer‑facing communications during incidents.

• Own App Sec standards for the product engineering team (code review security checklists, dependency scanning, secrets management in CI/CD, container hardening)
• Own vendor security decisions for product: which SaaS tools can we integrate and what restrictions should we have.
• Reduce attack…