Head of Cloud Security

About Traversal

Traversal is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for the enterprise-already trusted by some of the largest companies in the world to troubleshoot, remediate, and even prevent the most complex production incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and enable them to focus on creative, high-impact work.

Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we're channeling that scientific rigor and creativity into building the premier AI agent lab for the enterprise. Hence, what we're proudest of is assembling the most talented yet nicest group of individuals, including researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley, to world-class engineers from industry: Citadel Securities, Cockroach Labs, Datadog, DE Shaw, ServiceNow, Glean, Perplexity, Pinecone, and more, to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Without the entire team, none of this would be possible.

The Role

This is a Staff-level Security Engineer hire and the first person at Traversal to own application security and cloud security end-to-end. We're looking for someone who can assess our current security posture, identify gaps, chart a roadmap, and implement fixes, tooling, and processes to make Traversal's security best-in-class.

You'll be working on a platform that ingests sensitive production data from enterprise customers across some of the world's most complex environments. What you build here becomes Traversal's security foundation as we scale toward a Series B and beyond.

This is a hands-on engineering role with real ownership and organization-wide impact. It is not a policy role, a compliance role, or an advisory role

Responsibilities

• Own Traversal's infrastructure and application security posture end-to-end - assess where we are, define what good looks like, and implement the changes yourself
• Identify and remediate vulnerabilities across our cloud infrastructure, application layer, and customer-facing integrations - through code, not just recommendations
• Implement and maintain IAM policies, S3 configurations, Kubernetes security controls, and Terraform-managed infrastructure changes
• Build and enforce security standards for new features, API integrations, and customer environment access
• Own secrets management, JIT access, and identity architecture
• Drive security improvements across engineering - working directly with platform, backend, and AI teams to get changes shipped
• Secure our AI and agent layer - Traversal's agents ingest sensitive production observability data; you'll define what secure looks like in that context
• Support enterprise customer security reviews and compliance requirements (SOC 2 and beyond)

Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on security engineering with meaningful ownership of application or cloud security in production environments
• You implement, not just advise - comfortable writing Terraform, configuring IAM policies, managing cloud environments and controls, and hardening Kubernetes clusters directly
• Strong application security fundamentals - OWASP top 10 as a mental model, not a checklist; can apply it to novel and evolving attack surfaces
• Strong understanding of auth fundamentals - OAuth, JWT, token handling, and secure API design in multi-tenant environments
• Experience driving cloud infrastructure changes to improve security posture and seeing them through to implementation
• Has worked at a product company where customer data security was a core responsibility
• Startup experience - comfortable operating without a fully built security program around you

Nice to Have

• Can walk through a specific cloud infrastructure change you drove to improve security posture: what you found, what you changed, how you got it shipped
• Have been the primary security owner at a company, or close to it
• Have thought seriously about what securing an AI or agent system looks like
• Experience securing multi-tenant SaaS products where customer data isolation is a core requirement

Compensation

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and additional benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this full-time, in-person role in New York is $250,000 - $375,000, plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are based on location, level, and role. Individual compensation is determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

Why You Should Join Us

We'll make sure you're fully supported with health insurance, a great tech setup, flexible time off, and plenty of in-office snacks. We offer competitive salary and equity packages, and take thoughtful consideration with every hire on our small, high-impact team.

Traversal is fully in-office, 5 days a week, based in New York near Madison Square Park. We have a collaborative, hard-working culture and are energized by building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.

Working here means owning meaningful parts of the product, having the flexibility to move fast, and learning constantly. This is a place to grow your career, make a real impact, and help define a new category of infrastructure software.