Security Software Engineer, AI & Automation

Role Description

At NerdWallet, we're building tools and experiences that help people make smarter financial decisions. As a Security Software Engineer focused on AI and Automation, you'll help strengthen the security, reliability, and trust behind those experiences by designing AI-powered security systems that make secure software development more scalable and effective across our engineering organization.

In this role, you'll partner closely with security engineering and infrastructure teams to build automation and AI-powered solutions that help identify vulnerabilities, improve security reviews, and reduce risk across our platforms. You'll take ownership of security engineering initiatives that combine software development, AI systems experience, and security-first thinking to solve meaningful problems at scale.

You'll have room to bring new ideas, influence how AI and automation practices evolve at NerdWallet, and shape the future of security tooling within a team that values curiosity, informed risk-taking, and thoughtful problem-solving.

This role reports to the AI Security Manager.

Projects you may be working on in this position include:

• Designing and building multi-agent LLM systems and routing logic that automate threat modeling, security design review, policy Q&A, and vulnerability analysis at scale.
• Developing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and semantic search systems across large code and documentation repositories.
• Creating automated code review capabilities that help identify insecure patterns and improve software quality earlier in the development lifecycle.
• Designing integrations with tools such as GitHub, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and cloud platforms to embed security guidance into everyday engineering workflows.
• Developing REST APIs and platform services with authentication, authorization, rate limiting, observability, and secure handling of sensitive data.
• Designing and maintaining scalable data processing pipelines for large codebases and document repositories, including extraction, indexing, stream processing, batch jobs, and parallel execution.
• Improving AI application security through controls such as prompt injection prevention, sensitive data filtering, supply chain security, and secure handling of model inputs and outputs.
• Enhancing NerdWallet's secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) through automation, tooling, and developer-friendly security practices.
• Partnering with engineering teams to prioritize and remediate application and infrastructure security risks.
• Supporting incident response and on-call needs by contributing security engineering expertise, tooling, automation, and analysis when security issues arise.
• Identifying new opportunities for automation and AI augmentation across the security team, bringing fresh eyes and independent thinking to a growing backlog of high-impact work.

Where you can make an impact:

• Serve as technical lead on high-priority initiatives, taking ownership of technically complex work and collaborating across teams to deliver practical, measurable security outcomes.
• Help shape how AI and automation are securely adopted across NerdWallet's engineering ecosystem.
• Build tools and platforms that make security more accessible, scalable, and actionable for development teams.
• Improve the speed and quality of security reviews through thoughtful automation and security-first design.
• Strengthen customer trust by helping protect NerdWallet's products, systems, and sensitive data.
• Serve as an internal subject matter expert on AI and automation, advising on appropriate use cases, limitations, and risks to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software engineering or security engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python or Go for building production-grade backend services, APIs, and data pipelines; comfort moving between languages is expected.
• Experience building and maintaining backend services including REST APIs, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, streaming, and observability.
• Working knowledge of application security concepts including common vulnerability classes such as injection, broken authentication, cross-site scripting, insecure authorization, and secrets exposure; experience with threat modeling and SSDLC practices.
• Hands-on experience building AI-powered systems using LLM APIs, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, multi-agent architectures, and semantic search; working understanding of AI-specific security risks such as prompt injection, sensitive data exposure, and secure handling of model inputs and outputs.
• Genuine interest in AI and how it applies to security, not just as a tool to use, but as a domain to understand deeply, including its limitations and risks.
• Experience developing and operating distributed systems and cloud-based environments, including message queues, NoSQL databases, AWS, containers, Kubernetes or ECS, serverless, and infrastructure as code.
• Understanding of caching and performance patterns including Redis, semantic caching, TTLs, and cache invalidation.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain complex AI and security concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, and confident advising stakeholders on tradeoffs and limitations.

Benefits

• Work Hard, Stay Balanced (Life’s a series of balancing acts, eh?).
• Industry-leading medical, dental, and vision health care plans for employees and their dependents.
• Rejuvenation Policy – Flexible Vacation Time Off + 11 holidays + holiday company shutdown.
• New Parent Leave for employees with a newborn child or a child placed with them for adoption or foster care.
• Mental health support.
• Paid sabbatical after 5 years for Nerds to recharge, gain knowledge, and pursue their interests.
• Health and Dependent Care FSA and HSA Plan with monthly NerdWallet contribution.
• Monthly Wellness Stipend, Cell Phone Stipend, and Wifi Stipend (Only remote Nerds are eligible for the Wifi Stipend).
• Work from home equipment stipend and co-working space subsidy (Only remote Nerds are eligible for these stipends).
• Nerd-led group initiatives – Employee Resource Groups for Parents, Diversity, and Inclusion, Women, LGBTQIA, and other communities.
• Hackathons and team events across all teams and departments.
• Company-wide events like NerdLove (employee appreciation) and our annual Charity Auction.
• Our Nerds love to make an impact by paying it forward – Take 8 hours of volunteer time off per quarter and donate to your favorite causes with a company match.
• 401K with 4% company match.
• Be the first to test and benefit from our new financial products and tools.
• Financial wellness, guidance, and unlimited access to a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) through Northstar.
• Disability and Life Insurance with employer-paid premiums.