Founding Security Engineer

Department: Product & Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $200K – $400K

Employment Type: FullTime

About AIUC

AIUC builds standards and insurance for frontier AI. Our mission is to Underwrite superintelligence. We exist because risk, not capability, is becoming the binding constraint on AI being useful. History offers lessons for how to build confidence in new technology; electricity burned down houses until insurers funded Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to certify products against their standards. Today, the UL mark is a trustmark on every light bulb in America. We’re building that for AI.

AIUC-1, our standard for agent security, serves frontier builders like Cursor, Lovable, ElevenLabs, and Harvey. We've raised $55m from Ribbit, First Harmonic and Nat Friedman to audit frontier AI. Our team comes from METR, Anthropic, McKinsey, and OpenAI. Come join us.

The Role

AI agents now handle sensitive data and run real infrastructure. Their biggest risks, from prompt injection and credential sprawl to tool misuse and MCP and A2A attacks, still have no established defenses.

AIUC-1 is the standard Fortune 500 CISOs use to decide which AI agents they can trust. That only works if we’re the most secure company in the room.

You’ll be our first security hire, joining as we open our product to the world, while our own agents test other companies’ agents. You’ll own security end to end across our product, evaluation platform, and internal systems, and work directly with the founders. You’ll take on agent security problems nobody has solved, prove the answers on our own systems, and watch them become the playbook other companies follow.

From there, the ceiling is yours: become the security leader who advises our consortium of 300+ CISOs, helps shape AIUC-1’s security requirements, and defines what agent security means in practice.

This role is hard. You’ll say no often, including to the founders, and hold the line when it’s unpopular. The best way to make that work is to make the secure path the fast path. When you’re doing it well, no one talks about security.

In this role, you will:

• Make sure our product is secure as it reaches more and more enterprise customers

• Build the secure foundation for running agents: sandboxing, agent credential access, and core development

• Own security across the company: network, vendors, access, data, and customer security reviews

• Get ahead of the risks we don’t have yet, as new products and attack classes emerge

• Respond to incidents fast, and fix problems before they become incidents

• Feed what you learn back into AIUC-1, and share it with our CISO consortium through sessions and published work

What we're looking for

You’ve likely done this before: as the founding security hire at a technical or regulated-industry company, building the program from zero; or as a core engineer at a security company, where getting security right was the product.

• Engineer first: you’ve built production systems, can clear our full engineering bar, and want to start hands-on before growing into leading security

• Cloud and infrastructure security: you’ve secured least-privilege IAM, SSO, clean dev/prod separation, KMS and secrets management, plus secure databases, user management, and identity systems

• Agent builder: you’ve built an agent harness and know how to contain one, through sandboxing, tool permissions, credential isolation, and data-leak controls

• Holds the line, keeps people on side: you own outcomes end to end and can say no without being pushed around or burning bridges

• Ready when things break: you’ve built detection, logging, and incident response, and secured the corporate surface (SSO, devices, SaaS)

• Security as code: you review infrastructure changes in Terraform and automate controls so engineers move faster, not slower

Nice to Haves

• You’ve turned security research into production engineering (e.g. reproducing new attacks on agents and shipping the defenses)

• Deep architecture experience across distributed systems, ML pipelines, or large-scale platforms

• You’d enjoy learning from enterprise security teams, from our CISO consortium to customers, how agents are changing their environments

Our Values

We are in the business of building trust. We take our values seriously and treat them as commitments to each other, held to the same bar as the ones we make to customers.

• Strong back: high standards, keep our promises, work hard.

• Fast feet: experiment, cut scope, take delight in pace.

• Eyes up: wrestle with the mission, and let where AI is heading shape our strategy, our teams and our day-to-day work.

• Open heart: say the scary thing, create connection, make room for emotions.

Underwriting superintelligence is our life's work. If you want it to be yours, apply now.

Compensation & Perks

• Competitive annual salary

• Equity (significant part of total compensation)

• Health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents

• Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if needed

• Daily lunch, dinner & snacks