About the Team:Security Engineering protects Quizlet's learners, employees, and systems. We build practical safeguards that help teams deliver products securely and confidently. We partner with engineering, infrastructure, trust & safety, and other teams to reduce risk while supporting a reliable experience for learners.
About the Role:As a Staff Cloud Security Engineer, you will set technical direction and deliver security improvements across our cloud infrastructure and public-facing services. Your primary focus will be Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), workload identity, infrastructure as code, and remediation. You will also improve edge defenses and turn data-protection requirements into technical controls, automated checks, and evidence that those controls work.
In this role, you will:- Lead cloud and Kubernetes security improvements, including workload identity, organization policies, and network protections. Partner with Infrastructure and identity colleagues on design, implementation, and tested rollouts.
- Operate cloud security tooling, prioritize findings by risk, and work with engineers to remediate vulnerabilities and harden container images.
- Improve WAF rules, rate limits, bot defenses, and anomaly detection to catch malicious traffic while reducing disruption for legitimate users.
- Build maintainable security automation and review infrastructure as code so secure configurations are easier to adopt and sustain.
- Create self-service patterns for securely exposing new services and connecting AI tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations to approved data.
- Partner with engineering to implement agreed data-protection requirements through enforceable controls, CI checks, regression tests, and reliable evidence.
- Guide cross-team security decisions, mentor engineers, and support incident response and security on-call responsibilities.
What you bring to the table:- As a rough guide, we're looking for 8+ years working with public-cloud infrastructure, including 5+ years in cloud security engineering. These are guidelines rather than hard cutoffs; equivalent experience demonstrating the depth and Staff-level impact described here is welcome.
- Experience securing GCP and GKE environments.
- Deep hands-on experience securing production cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes workloads, including identity and access, networking, Linux, and containers.
- Experience using infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, and programming languages such as Python or Go to build security controls and automation.
- Ability to translate security requirements into practical controls, automated tests, and evidence of effectiveness.
- A record of leading complex technical work across teams, making and explaining sound risk tradeoffs, and communicating clearly and respectfully.
Bonus points if you have:- Experience designing and tuning WAF rules, rate limits, or bot defenses, with attention to detection quality and customer impact.
- Experience with Cloudflare and HUMAN/PerimeterX or comparable edge and bot-defense platforms.
- Experience operating Wiz or similar cloud security platforms and improving workload and container-image security.
- Experience securing AI or MCP integrations, or automating controls that support data-protection commitments and assurance frameworks.
Work LocationWe're happy to share that this is a
hybrid position in our
San Francisco office. To support collaboration, we ask employees to be in the office at least
two days a week: Wednesday and Thursday.
Compensation, Benefits & Perks:- Collaborate with your manager and team to create a healthy work-life balance
- 20 vacation days that we expect you to take!
- Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice)
- Employer-sponsored 401k plan with company match
- Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth
- Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits
- 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice
We strive to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome!We work to create a holistic interview process, where both Quizlet and candidates have an opportunity to view what it would be like to work together, in exploring a mutually beneficial partnership. We provide a transparent setting that gives a comprehensive view of who we are!
