Senior/Staff Security Engineer - Product Security

About You and The Role 

Product security at Zipline protects systems that directly affect safety, regulatory compliance, and uninterrupted delivery of critical goods in real-world operational environments. You will own security for production services and integrations that run our fleet orchestration, distribution center automation, telemetry/teleoperation, and developer/operator toolchains. This role is mission-critical: your work will reduce attack surface that could cause service outages, unsafe drone behavior, data exposure of patient/partner data, or regulatory failure.

You will join a small, high-ownership security team and partner deeply with software, infrastructure, autonomy/embedded, and field-ops teams. Expect hands-on engineering work, prioritized ownership of specific services, and a mandate to ship controls that measurably reduce risk in production systems under operational pressure. This is a hybrid onsite role: you will be at our South San Francisco HQ frequently and must be available for occasional travel to distribution centers and test sites.

What You'll Do

• Own security outcomes for 2-4 named production areas (examples: fleet orchestration APIs, DC orchestration/robotics control plane, telemetry and command channels, developer CI/CD and secrets platforms). Be the primary security owner for at least one area on hire.
• Deliver measurable risk reduction: define baseline metrics (e.g., mean-time-to-detect, mean-time-to-remediate, number of exploitable findings) and be accountable to improving them by defined targets in 6 and 12 months (example targets: cut exploitable high-risk findings by 50% in owned services; reduce MTTD for critical alerts to <30m).
• Design and implement production controls: IAM/least-privilege policies, service-to-service trust, key lifecycle and KMS integrations, runtime telemetry and alerting, secure OTA/update patterns for edge devices, and hardened CI/CD pipelines and build artifact provenance.
• Threat model and perform secure design reviews for services that operate near the physical fleet, regulated workflows, or partner/customer interfaces; produce engineering-tractable mitigations and drive their rollout to completion.
• Lead vulnerability management end-to-end for owned services: vulnerability triage with exploitability analysis, prioritized remediation plans with engineering partners, staged verification, and verification metrics for closure and regression prevention.
• Build and harden incident response for product incidents: author playbooks, run tabletop exercises with product and operations, validate logging/auditability so incidents are forensic-ready, and participate in incident postmortems with corrective action tracking.
• Secure AI/agent-assisted development and ops: define allowed copilots and patterns, implement guardrails to prevent secret exposure and unauthorized actions, and add monitoring/auditing for risky agent behaviors where it intersects owned systems.
• Integrate external pentest and red-team results into durable engineering changes; turn test findings into tracked engineering tickets and measurable closure criteria.
• Collaborate daily with SREs, platform engineers, autonomy/embedded teams, field ops, and compliance to translate regulatory/safety requirements (e.g., health-adjacent data handling, auditability) into concrete technical controls.

What You'll Bring

Hard requirements (must-haves):

• 8+ years building and operating security controls for large-scale production systems across application and cloud infrastructure.
• Demonstrable hands-on engineering ability: you ship automation or tooling in Python, Go, or similar and can build integrations with AI tools and agentic security bots (not only write policies).
• Deep practical experience with cloud-native stacks and microservices (Kubernetes, containers, IAM, CI/CD, secrets management, logging/telemetry) and with designing least-privilege service-to-service models.
• Prior ownership of vulnerability management, incident response playbooks, and verification processes for production services.
• Direct experience threat‑modeling and securing systems that interface with physical systems, regulated workflows, or third-party partners (embedded, teleoperation, field ops, or healthcare-adjacent data flows).
• Ability to define and track quantitative success metrics (MTTD, MTTR, number of exploitable findings, compliance audit readiness) and be accountable for meeting targets within 6–12 months.

Non-negotiable traits:

• Operates as a technical owner: can persuade engineering teams, prioritize trade-offs, and drive changes through to production without relying solely on policy enforcement.
• Skeptical, adversarial mindset: anticipates failure modes and abuse cases for systems that interact with the physical fleet and partner workflows.

Additional strong qualifications (if present):

• Experience securing LLM/agentic tools in engineering workflows and mitigating OWASP LLM risks (prompt injection, unsafe plugin/output handling, agentic privilege misuse).
• Background across multiple domains (cloud infra, web services, and embedded/autonomy) and experience building developer-friendly security platforms or paved-road tooling.

What Else You Need To Know

This is a hybrid role based in South San Francisco; frequent HQ presence required and occasional travel to field sites. This role has production ownership and will participate in incident response; candidates must be prepared for on-call participation when assigned.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!