The RoleWe're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our security team - the group responsible for keeping 70+ million creators, and everything they've built, safe. Linktree is the front door to a creator's whole digital presence, which makes it a target: account takeover, abusive content, scraped data, third-party integrations with more access than they should have. This role is about building the systems that make those attacks hard.
This is hands-on engineering, not advisory work. You'll design and ship authentication and authorisation improvements, secrets handling, abuse and fraud detection, and the internal tooling that lets every other squad build securely by default. You'll be across TypeScript, Node, React and AWS, and you'll work with Engineering, Product and Trust & Safety to decide where to harden, where to simplify, and where a control costs more in creator friction than it buys in risk reduction.
It's a role for someone who thinks in systems and failure modes, who would rather remove a class of vulnerability than patch instances of it, and who can bring other engineers along rather than block them. Every control you ship protects someone's livelihood - and helps Linktree achieve our mission: to empower anyone to curate and grow their digital universe.
What You'll Own- Design and ship security improvements across the Linktree product: authentication and authorisation, session and token handling, secrets management and third-party access.
- Build the detection and response capability for the product surface - abuse, account takeover, scraping and fraud - so problems surface before creators report them.
- Threat model new and existing systems with the squads that own them, and turn the output into prioritised, shipped work.
- Own the internal tooling and paved paths that make it easy for every other engineer to build securely by default.
- Triage and remediate vulnerabilities from internal findings, bug bounty and pen tests, and fix the class of problem rather than the instance.
- Partner with Engineering, Product and Trust & Safety on where to harden and where a control costs more in creator friction than it buys in risk reduction.
- Bring AI into how you build, and use it to move faster on reviews, migrations and investigation - while staying clear-eyed about what it gets wrong.
- Raise the security bar around you through review, pairing, documentation and mentoring.
Who We're Looking For- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on security, infrastructure, identity or another domain where getting it wrong is expensive.
- Strong full-stack skills across our core stack: TypeScript, Node.js, React, GraphQL, PostgreSQL or MySQL and AWS, with the ability to move across layers to ship a fix end-to-end.
- Working knowledge of application security fundamentals: the OWASP Top 10, authentication and authorisation, secrets management, cryptography in practice, and the common attack classes against consumer platforms.
- Experience threat modelling a real system and turning the output into shipped work, rather than a document nobody reads.
- A track record of shipping changes to a high-traffic, critical path safely - feature flags, staged rollouts, migrations and backwards compatibility.
- Fluency with AI-assisted development (Claude, Cursor, Codex and similar), including how to prompt, validate and refine what these tools produce - and where they introduce risk.
- A pragmatic instinct for balancing security against user experience, and the confidence to make that trade-off explicit with Product and Engineering.
- Able to influence engineers outside your own team without relying on mandate, and to write decisions down clearly.
- Based in Los Angeles or San Francisco, working hybrid from one of our offices.
Compensation & BenefitsLinktree is committed to providing a competitive compensation package. Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at
$200,000 - $215,000 in the San Francisco Bay or Los Angeles area. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate expertise, scope of role, and level, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Where and How We WorkWe are a global and diverse group offering a truly flexible and family friendly work environment. Kids, pets, and the occasional delivery person are all actively encouraged to appear on our Zoom screens. All of us at Linktree work either fully remote or a flex hybrid approach.
We offer autonomy and flexibility in how you structure your days and weeks. There will be the need for some collaboration outside of your usual 9-5 being a global company, but we aim to work asynchronously where possible.
How we'll help you thriveOur approach to benefits considers the whole person and the unique contributions they bring to Linktree. We want the experience at Linktree to be one that enables people to truly thrive so we can Go Further Together. Some ways we support you:
- An annual wellbeing allowance to use on things like (but not limited to) fitness memberships, development courses, childcare, travel, charitable donations, pet insurance, home office set up - the choice is yours!
- 100% coverage (and 80% for your dependents) of your monthly premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for US-based employees.
- Employer contribution towards your retirement.
- Generous time off for vacation, holidays, parental leave, volunteer time and other categories.
- Employee Stock Option Program - we want each and every employee to share in the company's success as we go further together.
To learn more about our benefits, including our parental leave program, volunteering leave, DE&I initiatives, and more, click here!
