Member of Technical Staff, Security Engineering

The Role

We're hiring a hands-on Staff Security Engineer to build the security foundation for a frontier AI platform serving enterprise customers — owning product/API security, enterprise security architecture, compliance readiness, and incident response as the company scales.

This is a senior/staff-level role for someone with 6+ years of experience who has operated as a TL/TLM or staff+ engineer
, remains deeply hands‑on, and can provide the leadership presence to make delegation and prioritization decisions as Inception grows. You'll be the first/early security leader at a company where security directly affects customer trust, revenue, and product velocity.

You'll own and drive the systems, processes, and infrastructure that make Inception secure by default: cloud security, network isolation, access controls, incident response, compliance readiness, secure engineering workflows, and customer‑facing security requirements. This role is ideal for someone who lives and breathes security, but is still a builder at heart — someone who can design secure systems, write production code, automate workflows, and partner deeply with engineering teams.

This is not a narrow GRC, IT, AI safety, or policy‑only role, and it is not AI‑specific security research. We're looking for traditional enterprise/product security execution from an "inverted T" engineer: broad software engineering ability with a deep spike in security. You'll be the internal expert who helps us navigate enterprise security, privacy, compliance, and infrastructure risk as we scale — a technical leader, not a friction point for the engineering team.

• Software engineering fundamentals: This is a software engineering role with a security specialization. Expect to spend 70%+ of your time writing code, building security tools, and automating security best practices. You'll need strong command of CS fundamentals, to design, build, and maintain secure software systems.
• Enterprise security architecture & threat modeling: Design secure systems and guide backend, product, and platform engineers on security architecture and threat modeling for Inception’s customer‑facing API and enterprise deployments.
• API / product security: Lead proactive threat protection for a public API product handling enterprise usage, analogous to companies exposing API surfaces like "ChatGPT or Claude".
• Compliance, certifications, and enterprise readiness: Lead or materially drive security compliance and certifications, including SOC 2 (including ongoing Type 2 readiness) and ISO 27001
  , plus data privacy and security best practices.
• VPC, GDPR, incident response, and 24/7 security coverage: Operate as a staff‑level "all‑in‑one specialist" across VPC design, network isolation, GDPR, incident response, security monitoring, and operational visibility for production systems.
• Secure infrastructure and tooling: Build and maintain secure infrastructure, automation, and internal tools across Inception’s product, platform, and enterprise systems — improving developer velocity while raising the security baseline.
• Engineering practices: Establish and promote secure development, code review, release management, vulnerability management, and incident response practices.
• Pragmatic partnership: Review systems and architectures for security risks and help engineers make pragmatic tradeoffs. Contribute beyond a narrow security lane when needed, especially across backend, infrastructure, platform, and developer tooling.

• You have 6+ years of security engineering experience or equivalent staff‑level depth, and have operated as a TL/TLM or staff+ engineer who still ships.
• You've built security for enterprise‑facing products, APIs, infrastructure, or compliance‑heavy environments
  , and have worked with customers who have procurement, compliance, or customer‑trust requirements.
• You have hands‑on experience with product/API security for customer‑facing APIs.
• You have driven or owned SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR
  , or comparable compliance and certification programs.
• You've built or owned internal security systems, privacy infrastructure, identity and access management, encryption,…