Senior Application Security Engineer, Upstart

• This role is well suited for an experienced application security engineer who can lead substantial technical initiatives, navigate ambiguity, and deliver durable improvements that raise the security bar across the team and its partners
• 5+ years of experience in security engineering, software engineering, or a related technical role, including 2+ years focused on application or product security
• Experience leading security projects involving multiple contributors or partner teams
• Experience conducting threat modeling and security architecture reviews for complex production applications
• Experience developing production software or security automation in Java, Python, Ruby, Go, or a similar programming language
• Experience designing or implementing application security controls across the software development lifecycle, including several of the following: API security, secure coding standards, SAST, DAST, SCA, CI/CD security, or secrets management
• Experience identifying, validating, prioritizing, and driving remediation of application vulnerabilities
• Experience securing cloud-native or distributed systems, including web applications, APIs, or microservices
• Experience investigating significant application security issues or incidents and translating findings into corrective engineering work

Desirable

• Upstart’s Application Security team enables product and engineering teams to build secure products without slowing innovation
• We believe security should move at the speed of the business and that safety by design should be embedded throughout the software development lifecycle
• Through engineering, automation, and close collaboration, we protect Upstart’s customer-facing products, internal applications, APIs, and AI-enabled systems while maintaining a positive developer experience
• As a Senior Application Security Engineer at Upstart, you will lead application security projects that reduce risk across our products and engineering ecosystem
• You will partner with product, platform, data, infrastructure, and engineering teams to identify security risks, review designs, build preventative controls, and drive complex issues through remediation
• Lead application security projects from planning through implementation, coordinating contributors and dependencies to deliver high-quality outcomes
• Conduct threat modeling and security architecture reviews for complex customer-facing applications, APIs, distributed services, and AI/ML systems
• Design and implement secure-by-default controls across the software development lifecycle, including secure coding standards, API protections, automated testing, CI/CD safeguards, and secrets management
• Partner with engineering teams to identify systemic vulnerabilities, evaluate practical remediation options, and ensure high-risk issues are resolved effectively
• Build services and automation that improve vulnerability detection, prioritization, validation, and prevention while reducing friction for developers
• Assess the security of AI-enabled products and developer workflows, including GenAI integrations, agentic systems, model inputs and outputs, sensitive-data handling, and access boundaries
• Provide technical leadership during high-severity application security incidents, helping determine root causes and drive durable follow-up improvements
• Improve team effectiveness by contributing to design and code reviews, documenting reusable patterns, mentoring engineers, and helping strengthen application security practices across Upstart