Security Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Apollo Research works with most frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others) to test their models before deployment and collaborate on fundamental scheming research. Our coding agent security product, Watcher, is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and enterprises. Security exists at Apollo to safeguard the trust our lab partners place in us and to enable that research. Our own team runs around 400 billion tokens a month through AI agents, which makes Apollo both a target and a testbed. We’re hiring Security Engineers to join the Infra & Security Team. In this role, you will design, implement, and deploy the security controls that keep Apollo secure, and make the secure path the default path for everyone. You will build the security layer for a novel insider risk that didn’t exist before.

🏢 About Apollo Research

Apollo Research works with most frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others) to test their models before deployment and collaborate on fundamental scheming research. Our coding agent security product, Watcher, is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and enterprises. Security exists at Apollo to safeguard the trust our lab partners place in us and to enable that research. Our own team runs around 400 billion tokens a month through AI agents, which makes Apollo both a target and a testbed.

🎯 The Role

You will design, implement, and deploy the security controls that keep Apollo secure, and make the secure path the default path for everyone. You will build the security layer for a novel insider risk that didn’t exist before.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate Apollo’s core security controls: identity and access management, infrastructure and cloud security, endpoint management, and incident response.
• Build paved roads that make the secure path the default, easy path
• Establish and advocate for security practices across Apollo, and build the organizational trust needed for people to adopt them, communicating security decisions and tradeoffs clearly along the way.
• Evaluate vendors and tooling, make build-vs-buy calls on security infrastructure, and assess vendor security posture before adoption.
• Lead major security projects end to end, from ideation through implementation and rollout.
• Collaboratively define and shape the security roadmap and priorities.

📌 Required Qualifications

Must-haves

• 5+ years in security roles in a hands-on technical capacity (not purely GRC/compliance). You’d need to be able to think structurally about threat modeling and failure modes. You need to be able to read code, understand infrastructure, and evaluate technical controls.
• Engineering mindset. You treat security as an engineering problem. You are capable of, and willing to, build custom solutions when the task demands it, rather than relying on ‘glueing’ together off-the-shelf tools. You prioritize automation and systems-level thinking to scale security, and you are comfortable leveraging AI to accelerate development.
• Direct experience with application security, cloud security, or product security. Ideally you’ve owned or significantly contributed to the security posture of an organisation that handles sensitive customer data.
• Influence without authority. You have a track record of building buy-in for security practices and being trusted by non-security people.
• Startup pace. You are excited about a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities, and willing to grind when it matters.

⭐ Desirable Experience

Nice-to-haves

• Software engineering experience
• Experience implementing zero-trust architectures
• Experience with sandboxing
• Experience with detection engineering
• Experience with GRC engineering
• Experience with incident response
• Hands-on experience with endpoint management (Kandji, Jamf, or similar)
• Experience with identity/access management

🎁 Benefits

• This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
• Salary: San Francisco: $214,000 – $280,000; London: £144,000 – £189,000. We will be looking to meaningfully raise salaries soon.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We want to emphasize that people who feel they don’t fulfill all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position, nonetheless, are strongly encouraged to apply.