Software Engineer, Security Infrastructure

Sift

$180K — $230K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4-7+ years of hands-on experience in security engineering, platform/DevSecOps, or cloud infrastructure roles, preferably at founding or early-stage companies.
  • Proven track record of shipping production-grade security automation in cloud-native environments, especially AWS.
  • Deep familiarity with implementing technical controls for SOC 2, FedRAMP, or similar frameworks in production systems.
  • Strong proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, Go, Bash, or similar languages with a preference for custom tooling.
  • Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and container environments (Kubernetes), integrating security from the start.
  • Knowledge across core security domains including access control, monitoring, encryption, and incident response.
  • Strong problem-solving skills with a focus on building clean, automated solutions.

Responsibilities

  • Build and maintain tooling, scripts, and automation for security and compliance across AWS and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Develop internal solutions to make security and compliance automatic and auditable.
  • Embed security guardrails into infrastructure-as-code and deployment workflows to promote secure practices.
  • Partner with infrastructure teams to implement hardening measures and access controls for cloud-native systems.
  • Enhance visibility into security posture through automated reporting and real-time observability.
  • Translate compliance requirements into effective technical controls, moving beyond manual checklists.
  • Automate security workflows to enable fast shipping of engineering solutions without compromising security.
  • Support incident response through improved tooling for faster detection and recovery.

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment with in-person collaboration twice a week.
  • Relocation assistance to Los Angeles or options to work from the San Francisco office.
  • Opportunity to work on high-impact projects in the aerospace, defense, and enterprise sectors.
Full Job Description
In This Role, You'll:
  • Secure-by-default guardrails: Build the patterns, libraries, and standards for authentication, authorization, input handling, and cryptography that make whole classes of vulnerability hard to introduce. Ensure the secure path is the path of least resistance.
  • Software supply chain: Own dependency integrity, artifact signing, and build-pipeline trust. This matters especially for the self-managed and air-gapped deployments our customers run.
  • Threat modeling and secure design: Partner with engineering teams on new features and architectural changes across a distributed, polyglot system, and turn the results into concrete design decisions.
  • Developer-facing security tooling: Own the appsec toolchain in CI/CD: SAST, software composition analysis, secret scanning, and fuzzing. Tune it so developers get findings worth acting on, then work with the owning teams to drive remediation.
  • Raise engineering's security fluency: Make security knowledge something engineers pick up from design reviews, documentation, and working with you, not something they have to come ask for.

The Skillset You'll Bring:
  • 5+ years building production software, including direct security ownership of a codebase you shipped. You are a software engineer first, applying that skill to security.
  • Fluency reading and reviewing a compiled systems language, with depth in Go or Rust.
  • Strong grounding in application security: web and API vulnerability classes, authentication and authorization patterns, and applied cryptography, applied through threat modeling and design review on distributed systems.
  • Hands-on experience embedding security tooling (SAST, SCA, secret scanning) into developer workflows and CI/CD, tuned for signal over noise.
  • A track record of building security tooling or libraries that other teams actually adopted.
  • Clear communication with engineers and leadership. You can explain risk and tradeoffs to people who don't live in security.

Bonus Points:
  • Experience securing software that ships to customer-controlled, on-premise, or air-gapped environments.
  • Familiarity with software supply chain tooling and standards (Sigstore, SLSA, SBOM generation).
  • Fuzzing native or high-throughput data paths.
  • Exposure to regulated environments such as defense or aerospace.


Location:

SIFT's headquarters is in Marina Del Rey, CA (Next to LAX). We collaborate in person twice a week-on Mondays and Thursdays-and come together for a full week every two months. We are open to relocating candidates to LA or working from our San Francisco office for the right candidate.

Salary range: $180,000 - $230,000 per year. Plus equity and benefits.

Eligibility:

U.S. Citizenship Required: This position requires U.S. citizenship due to the nature of certain customer environments, security requirements, and access obligations associated with the role.

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Sift

More Information Technology Jobs

Find similar Software Engineer, Security Infrastructure jobs: