Head of Security & Infrastructure Remote

Location: Remote - United States only (must reside in the U.S.)

Team: Security & Infrastructure

Reports to: CTO (you'll work directly with the CTO)

Rise is a global payments and payroll platform built for the way modern teams actually work - across borders, currencies, and rails. We make it possible for companies to pay full-time employees, contractors, and freelancers anywhere in the world, in either fiat or digital assets, with the compliance, tax, and identity infrastructure handled underneath.

Our stack runs on Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Big Query, Google Sec Ops), with MySQL
, a Node.js / Type Script application layer, and Cloudflare (including Cloudflare Pages) at the edge. Settlement for stablecoin payments runs on Ethereum and EVM-compatible networks through our own smart contracts and treasury wallets. Because we move money for real people, security and correctness are first-order concerns in everything we ship.

We're a lean, high-trust, high-ownership team. Because we move real money for real people, we hold a high bar for correctness, security, and accountability - the work is meaningful precisely because the stakes are real. We value:

• Ownership over hand-offs. You'll own security and infrastructure end to end and have the autonomy that comes with that.

• Security as a default, not a phase. Handling funds and personal data means security thinking is part of every decision, not a box checked at the end.

• Directness and low ego. We give and receive candid feedback, write things down, and prefer clarity over politics.

• AI-first in how work gets done. We use AI agents and assistants as a core part of daily work - writing and reviewing code and Terraform, triaging alerts, investigating logs, drafting runbooks and policies, and automating the toil that would otherwise eat the day. We expect everyone to work this way and to keep getting better at it.

• Remote-first discipline. We're a globally distributed team spread across time zones around the world, and we communicate asynchronously with a bias toward documentation and reproducibility.

Working directly with the CTO, you'll own security across Rise's cloud, edge, and on-chain surfaces, and the infrastructure operations that keep production healthy. You are the first dedicated security role at Rise, but you are not starting from zero: you inherit a working program - SOC 2 certification, Google Sec Ops, Terraform-managed GCP, Cloudflare at the edge, and established on-chain treasury controls - and your job is to own it, harden it, and take it further.

Security is the center of gravity for the role, with infrastructure and reliability close behind, on a mostly serverless stack designed to keep operational overhead low.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will not manage people, but you are the security leader for the company: you set security direction, make the calls on risk, represent Rise to auditors, partners, and customers, and are the person engineering and leadership turn to when a security or infrastructure question needs an answer. It is a builder's seat, not an advisory one - you'll harden what exists, design what's missing, and ship it yourself.

Security operations (Sec Ops)

• Own and run Rise's security operations: detection engineering, alert triage, investigation, and response across GCP, Cloudflare, Git Hub, and Google Workspace.

• Build and tune detections in Google Sec Ops (Chronicle) over Cloud Audit Logs, load-balancer and Cloud Run request logs, Cloudflare firewall logs, and application telemetry - covering anomalous traffic, abuse, credential misuse, insider risk, and scanning - and keep log ingestion and feed health reliable.

• Establish and track behavioral baselines so new or escalated activity stands out from normal operations.

• Own incident response: detection, containment, forensics, remediation, and blameless post-mortems - and build the tooling and runbooks so we respond faster next time.

• Run tabletop exercises and game days so our response is proven, not assumed.

• Build AI-driven security automation: agent-based log review, alert triage and enrichment, and scheduled investigation passes over GCP, Cloudflare, and Git Hub activity, so a team of one can cover what used to take a SOC shift.

Security posture & architecture

• Own Rise's security posture across cloud, edge, data, and on-chain surfaces.

• Design and enforce a zero trust access model: identity-aware access to production and internal…