Senior Security Engineer

📋 Job Overview

As a Senior Security Engineer, you'll set a new standard for security in an industry where trust is profoundly broken. Join at a rare inflection point: we've earned the hard-fought trust of leading financial institutions, and now you'll build the security foundation that scales this trust to tens of millions of consumers.

🏢 About January

Application Collections today works like an emergency room. The doctors carry too many patients, everyone arrives at their worst moment, and nobody has their chart. We're making it primary care. January personalizes interactions and optimizes decisions across every stage of consumer credit. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere.

Most consumers want to pay what they owe. They want a way out, not a break. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. Those consumers rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more because we collect more and charge less.

🎯 The Role

You'll architect dual trust — securing both consumer-facing experiences and bank-grade enterprise systems — while solving technical challenges that exist nowhere else: privacy-preserving data systems, multi-jurisdiction compliance automation, and AI-enabled decisioning. You'll shape security strategy and culture from the ground up with direct influence on company direction, proving your security work isn't overhead. It's the competitive moat that unlocks enterprise partnerships and enables market expansion.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Embed security as a competitive advantage: Transforms January's security into product capabilities that banks choose us for, not just a compliance checkbox they tolerate. Unlocks Tier 1 partnerships and enterprise deals competitors can't close.
• Drive security-by-design across product and application development: Partners with product and engineering to identify and elevate critical risks before production, with deep focus on application security (frontend, Flask services, database). Embeds security into discovery and design while building secure-by-default patterns into development workflows. Accelerates product development through early engagement and clear guidance, not late-stage gate-keeping.
• Architect systems for bank-grade data protection: Designs and implements data classification, encryption, and access control meeting regulated client requirements. Establishes automated controls ensuring sensitive data never leaves authorized boundaries.
• Cultivate a security-first engineering culture: Influences engineering teams to adopt security-first thinking without sacrificing velocity. Leads incident response with clarity and urgency, ensuring January emerges from security events stronger through rigorous post-mortems.
• Scale compliance with minimal overhead: Maintains SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and financial compliance through automated systems. Builds infrastructure that auto-generates audit evidence and eliminates compliance bottlenecks.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 6+ years in cybersecurity, 3+ years in application/data security or security engineering
• Hands-on building application-level security controls in cloud environments (AWS, Terraform, Snowflake)
• Track record implementing security that accelerates velocity, not blocks it
• Technical depth: secure coding (Python, JavaScript), infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD security
• Influences through partnership, decides rapidly despite uncertainty
• Translates technical trade-offs into business language
• Proficiency in common scripting and programming languages, such as Python, JavaScript, and Bash, is strongly preferred.
• Experience with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, bank security standards) preferred.

🎁 Benefits

Salary: $200K – $231K • Offers Equity

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.