Senior Engineer Job Washington area,District of Columbia USA,IT/Tech

The Atlantic is looking for a hands‑on Senior Engineer to help us deliver industry‑leading security across our applications and services. We aim to support a more thoughtful American public by powering and expanding our Pulitzer Prize‑winning journalism — and we want the products we ship to be worthy of that mission.

This is a unique opportunity to contribute to innovative, high-profile projects: you will configure, program, and integrate advanced security systems, working closely with engineering teams to keep our platforms seamless, secure, and reliable.

Minimum Qualifications:

5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant hands‑on work in security engineering
Strong backend programming ability and comfort with general Dev Ops work (CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, cloud platforms)
Deep understanding of secure software design and modern application security practices, including zero trust principles
Hands‑on experience with IAM, WAFs, and secure data access controls
A track record of owning security incidents end to end — triage, root cause, and durable fixes

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience securing agentic and LLM-driven workflows against over-access, data exfiltration, and backdoors
Experience developing security tooling and automation
Familiarity with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and an infrastructure-as-code tool (Terraform or similar)
Background in consumer-facing web or mobile products
Experience using observability and monitoring tools (Datadog, Sentry) as security and quality signals in production
Familiarity with threat modeling and secure-by-design architecture

As The Atlantic's Senior Security Engineer, you will:

Partner with engineering teams to architect applications with security and data protection built in from the start, including zero trust networking and secure data access controls
Review architecture diagrams, code, and proposals to spot security issues before they ship
Secure agentic and LLM-driven workflows to prevent over-access, data exfiltration, and backdoors
Work with Operations to stand up and tune WAFs and IAM
Develop tooling that makes it easier to secure our applications and company data
Triage security incidents, identify root causes, and build solutions that prevent recurrence
Participate in on‑call rotation (outside of standard business hours) to monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve production incidents, ensuring system reliability and uptime.
Contribute to general Dev Ops and backend engineering across company-wide architecture
The role will at times include night, early‑morning, and weekend work.

As The Atlantic's Senior Security Engineer, you are:

A builder, deep and broad:
This is fundamentally an engineering role — you'd rather build, architect, and solve hard technical problems than manage a checklist. You're equally at home in backend code, infrastructure, and Dev Ops, and you measure your impact in systems shipped and risks eliminated, not tickets tracked.
Security‑minded by design:
You think like an attacker, architect defensively, and build security into systems rather than bolting it on afterward.
AI‑fluent:
You understand how agentic and LLM‑driven systems create new categories of security risk, and you're excited to work out how to secure them.
A collaborator:
You embed naturally with engineering teams and help them build securely by partnering on solutions — earning trust rather than enforcing from the outside.
Pragmatic:
You balance strong security with the need to ship, and you gravitate toward the simplest solution that genuinely reduces risk.
A strong communicator:
You can articulate security risk and tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and non‑technical stakeholders.
An interest in the pursuit of truth:
You believe in what The…