Principal Engineer

As a Principal Software Engineer focused on Security & Compliance, you will set the technical direction for how CoCounsel earns and maintains the trust of law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies that rely on us with privileged, sensitive, and regulated data every day. You will own the architecture and engineering practices behind our SOC 2, ISO 27001/42001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP programs, turning compliance requirements into resilient, well-instrumented systems rather than one-off audit exercises.

This role sits at the intersection of the CoCounsel Legal engineering organization and our security, privacy, and legal/compliance teams, partnering closely with platform, identity, and AI/ML engineering to deliver world-class, provably trustworthy legal AI experiences at scale.

About the role:

• Own the compliance architecture: Understand and evolve the technical controls that satisfy the landscape of compliance; including but not limited to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001/42001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP (Moderate/High) requirements across CoCounsel's infrastructure, data pipelines, and AI systems. Work to understand implications of new compliance and/or certifications.  Your decisions will shape how every product line proves trust to customers and auditors.
• Build compliance as code: Look to help make the manual better, determine where point-in-time audit prep can be replaced with automated evidence collection, continuous control monitoring, and policy-as-code so that compliance state is observable and provable at any time, not just during an audit window.
• Engineer for real production scale and sensitivity: Design encryption, key management, data residency, tenant isolation, and audit logging for systems handling millions of privileged legal documents and thousands of concurrent AI interactions from professionals doing time-sensitive work.
• Technical leadership and cross-functional influence: Partner with Security, Legal, Privacy, and Product to translate regulatory and contractual requirements (customer security questionnaires, DPAs, government agency requirements) into engineering roadmaps. Mentor staff and senior engineers, raising the bar on secure-by-design development, threat modeling, and incident response across the org.
• Reliability and assurance: Establish SLOs, observability, and incident response practices for compliance-critical systems, and build the internal tooling (dashboards, alerting, control testing) that gives engineering, security, and leadership real-time confidence in our control environment.

About You:

You are a fit for the position of Principal Software Engineer, Security & Compliance if your background includes:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Direct, hands-on experience building or operating production systems that achieved and maintained SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 (and/or 42001), and HIPAA compliance — not just reading about it in a policy document.
• Experience supporting a FedRAMP authorization process (SSP development, control implementation, 3PAO assessments, or ConMon) at the Moderate or High baseline.
• Deep backend engineering expertise (Python, Java, Go, or similar) and experience with production systems on a major cloud provider (AWS preferred), including how to implement controls natively in cloud infrastructure rather than bolt them on.
• Working knowledge of security control frameworks such as NIST 800-53, NIST CSF, or CIS Benchmarks, and the ability to map technical implementation to specific control requirements.
• Hands-on experience with identity and access management — authentication and authorization at scale (SSO, SAML, OIDC, OAuth 2.0, RBAC/ABAC), encryption and key management, and audit logging.
• Proven track record owning large, complex compliance or security initiatives end-to-end: architecture, execution, audit readiness, and long-term operation.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to partner with auditors, security, legal, product, and engineering teams in a fast-moving environment.

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• Experience achieving or maintaining a FedRAMP ATO with JAB or agency sponsorship, including direct interaction with 3PAOs and federal agency security teams.
• Experience with GRC and compliance automation tooling (e.g., Vanta, Drata, OneTrust, or comparable platforms) and building custom evidence-collection pipelines where off-the-shelf tools fall short.
• Experience in regulated industries handling sensitive data — legal, healthcare, financial services, or government.
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CCSP, or similar.
• Experience building compliance and security controls for AI/LLM systems specifically — model access controls, prompt/response data handling, and safeguards around sensitive or privileged content.

#LI-ES1

 

New Position: This position is open due to an existing vacancy to support our evolving business needs.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment (2-3 days a week in the office depending on the role) for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.

• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.

• Career Development and Growth: By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.

• Industry Competitive Benefits: We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.

• Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.

• Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.

• Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.

Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $183,100 USD - $340,000 USD. For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $158,900 USD - $295,100 USD. Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs. This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.