Senior Application Security Engineer, AI and Machine Learning

Senior Application Security Engineer, AI and Machine Learning

San Francisco, California, United States; Seattle, Washington, United States

Who We Are

Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning. Founded in 2019, we build an end-to-end platform for developing, training, and deploying AI systems—designed to take ideas from research to production with less friction.

Through our merger with Voltage Park, a neocloud and AI Factory, Lightning AI combines developer-first software with cost-efficient, large-scale compute. Teams get the tools they need for experimentation, training, and production inference, with security, observability, and control built in.

We serve solo researchers, startups, and large enterprises. Lightning AI operates globally with offices in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, and is backed by Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Firstminute.

What We're Looking For

We are looking for a Senior Application Security Engineer to help secure our AI, machine learning, and inference platforms. This is a hands on technical role focused on building security into modern AI infrastructure, inference systems, and developer platforms.

You will work closely with platform engineers, ML engineers, and infrastructure teams to identify risks, design secure architectures, and build security tooling that enables engineers to move quickly and safely.

This role is execution focused. You will drive technical implementation, perform deep security reviews, and help build out our application security capabilities alongside the CISO and engineering leadership.

This role can be based out of one of our office hubs (San Francisco or Seattle) with in-office requirements of at least 2 days per week, plus occasional team/company offsites. We are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this position at this time.

What You'll Do

Secure AI and Machine Learning Systems

• Perform threat modeling across AI platforms, inference services, and ML pipelines
• Identify risks such as prompt injection, model extraction, adversarial inputs, and data leakage
• Review model serving architectures and inference pipelines
• Partner with ML engineers to secure training, fine tuning, and deployment workflows
• Help design isolation and security controls for multi tenant AI workloads

Application Security Engineering

• Perform architecture and design security reviews
• Conduct targeted code reviews for high risk components
• Identify security gaps in APIs, micro-services, and distributed systems
• Build secure patterns for authentication, authorization, and service to service communication
• Help engineering teams implement secure defaults and guardrails

Inference Platform Security

• Secure customer facing inference APIs and services
• Protect against abuse, model extraction, and adversarial behavior
• Design rate limiting, isolation, and workload protection controls
• Build monitoring and detection for anomalous inference behavior

AI Supply Chain and Model Security

• Evaluate open source models and dependencies
• Secure model artifacts and distribution pipelines
• Implement integrity validation and provenance controls
• Help secure container images and runtime environments

Security Automation and Tooling

• Build security automation for AI and application pipelines
• Integrate security scanning into CI/CD workflows
• Develop tooling to help engineers detect and fix issues early
• Improve developer experience with security guardrails

What You'll Need

Required Experience

• Strong background in application security engineering
• Experience performing threat modeling and architecture reviews
• Experience securing APIs and distributed systems
• Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Experience with containers and Kubernetes
• Strong scripting or programming skills such as Python, Go, or similar
• Experience working closely with engineering teams to implement security improvements

AI and Machine Learning Experience

• Experience securing ML pipelines, inference systems, or data platforms
• Familiarity with risks such as prompt injection, model extraction, and adversarial inputs
• Experience reviewing model serving architectures
• Understanding of training data security and data leakage risks

It's a Strong Plus If You Have

• Red team or offensive security experience
• Experience crafting payloads and evaluating CVEs for exploitability in diverse environments
• Experience with GPU infrastructure or high performance computing
• Experience with Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar frameworks
• Experience with LLM systems, RAG pipelines, or agent frameworks
• Experience building security automation pipelines
• Experience securing multi tenant infrastructure

What Success Looks Like

• Security is embedded into AI platform architecture early
• Engineering teams ship quickly with secure defaults
• Inference platforms are resilient against abuse and extraction
• Model pipelines are secure and auditable
• Security tooling scales with engineering growth

Why This Role Matters

This role sits at the intersection of application security, AI infrastructure, and developer platforms. You will help define how we secure modern AI systems while enabling engineers to move quickly and safely.

You will work closely with engineering leadership and the CISO to build practical, scalable security capabilities that support rapid innovation in AI and machine learning.

Compensation

We are committed to offering competitive compensation that reflects the value each team member brings to our mission. Final offers are based on factors such as experience, skills, geographic location, and role expectations. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package for eligible roles includes a discretionary bonus, a meaningful equity component, and comprehensive benefits.

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is:

$180,000 - $220,000 USD

Benefits and Perks

We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support our employees' health, well-being, and long-term success. Benefits may vary by location, team, and role.

Benefits include:

• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision coverage (U.S.); Private medical and dental insurance (U.K.)
• Retirement and financial wellness support (U.S.); Pension contribution (U.K.)
• Generous paid time off, plus holidays
• Paid parental leave
• Professional development support
• Wellness and work-from-home stipends
• Flexible work environment

At Lightning AI, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We believe that diverse teams drive innovation and create better products. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We are dedicated to building a culture where everyone can thrive and contribute to their fullest potential.