Staff Engineer, Security
Lead security engineering as the most senior hands-on engineer, shaping multi-year roadmap and building secure-by-default infrastructure including auth, data security, and vulnerability management.
Member of Technical Staff
Conduct original research on AI system security and privacy, develop defenses and evaluation frameworks, and translate findings into production improvements at Perplexity. Requires PhD or equivalent with publications at top security venues and deep expertise in security domains.
220k – 405kSan Francisco, CASecurity EngineeringOnsite7+ YOE
About the role
Responsibilities
- Develop threat models for emerging attack surfaces in AI-native products, including browser, search, and autonomous agents.
- Identify and analyze security and privacy threats across AI systems, infrastructure, and user-facing products.
- Develop novel defenses, mitigations, and detection mechanisms for security and privacy in AI-native products.
- Build security evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets to measure the effectiveness of different defense mechanisms.
- Partner with Perplexity’s Security Engineering team to translate state of the art research into shipped security features and hardened system architectures.
- Collaborate with top-tier academic and industry researchers in SII's external research network.
- Publish findings at premier venues and contribute to the broader security research community.
Qualifications
- Hold a PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, with a primary focus on security and/or privacy.
- Experience publishing at top security conferences (IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS) demonstrating original, impactful research contributions.
- Deep expertise in one or more of: security of agentic systems, systems security, web and applications security, program analysis, and software security.
- Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
- Ability to operate with high independence, willing to dive in and take ownership, and comfortable in a fast-paced environment where research directly informs product.
- Clear and concise communication, translating complex attack narratives into actionable insights for engineering and leadership.
Skills
PythonTypeScriptGoRustSecurity ResearchPrivacy ResearchThreat ModelingProgram AnalysisSoftware SecuritySystems SecurityWeb SecurityAgentic Systems Security
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