Staff Security Engineer

The Role:

Ambience runs real-time clinical workflows inside some of the country’s most security-sensitive health systems. Security can’t be bolted on—it must be engineered into the product.

This is a senior technical role focused on how Ambience designs, builds, and operates secure products. You’ll bring deep product security expertise and a strong software engineering foundation while extending your impact into cloud security as our AWS environment evolves.

You’ll partner with engineering from design through verification on high-risk changes and foundational product capabilities. You’ll own security analysis, technical requirements, risk decisions, and tooling—and contribute code wherever it creates the most leverage.

You’ll design secure systems, work fluently with code, and use AI to build context quickly, accelerate learning, and extend your reach—while grounding every decision in strong computer science, security fundamentals, and technical judgment.

What You’ll Own:

• Secure design for high-risk changes — Guide initiatives from design proposals and architecture decisions through implementation and verification. Define threat models and security requirements, review sensitive implementation paths, and contribute prototypes, automation, or PRs when needed.
• A credible, risk-based security backlog — Own findings from product reviews, bug bounty, penetration tests, audits, cloud tooling, and hands-on testing. Validate impact, recommend practical mitigations, and drive material issues to verified resolution or explicit risk acceptance.
• Security engineering that scales — Expand coverage through guidance, developer enablement, automation, and well-operated tooling. Own tools across integration, tuning, triage, maintenance, and measurement—and improve or retire those that aren’t reducing risk.
• Cloud risk reduction through our AWS migration — Partner with Platform and Infrastructure Engineering to reduce risk across IAM, network segmentation, workload isolation, secrets, logging, and configuration. Apply strong security fundamentals while building deeper AWS expertise, operationalizing our CNAPP, and establishing practical guardrails.
• Security across the environment — Reduce risk across production, development, software delivery, enterprise AI, and internal systems. Help scope and remediate incidents, then turn lessons learned into durable improvements and secure paved paths.

Who You Are:

• Staff-level product security judgment. You have the depth to operate independently across complex product security challenges—typically developed through 8+ years of experience—and the range to extend into adjacent areas such as cloud security. You don’t just find vulnerabilities; you design systems that prevent entire classes of them.
• Engineering roots. You’ve shipped production code, built meaningful software or automation recently, and are strong in at least one backend or automation language such as Go, Python, Java, or TypeScript. You see security as an engineering problem, not a compliance checklist.
• Product security depth. You understand authentication and authorization—including OAuth, OIDC, SAML, JWT, RBAC, and ReBAC—as well as API security, threat modeling, secure code review, vulnerability testing, and multi-tenant SaaS handling sensitive data. You can move from an architecture diagram into the implementation path that matters.
• Cloud security fluency or aptitude. You have working knowledge of cloud security concepts such as IAM, network architecture, workload isolation, secrets, and logging—or a demonstrated ability to develop that expertise quickly.
• Offensive validation instincts. You can reproduce vulnerabilities, conduct targeted dynamic testing, build proof-of-concept exploits, and distinguish exploitable risk from theoretical concern.
• Demonstrated influence. You’ve helped engineering teams understand, prioritize, remediate, and verify material security risks.
• Tooling ownership. You’ve owned security tooling or automation beyond deployment, including integration, tuning, triage, maintenance, and evaluation.
• AI-augmented security engineering. You use AI as a force multiplier to develop depth in unfamiliar domains, expand your coverage, and move with greater speed. You validate its output against first principles and remain accountable for every technical and security decision.
• Based in the Bay Area and able to work from our San Francisco office three days per week.

Nice to Have:

• Experience securing healthcare systems, PHI, or similarly regulated data
• Experience designing or securing relationship-based or fine-grained authorization systems
• Offensive security or red-team depth used to demonstrate impact and influence priorities
• Experience securing enterprise AI applications, AI-enabled products, or internal AI adoption
• Deep AWS security experience, including IAM, network architecture, workload isolation, configuration management, and CNAPP operations

Why Ambience:

At most companies, security is reactive. At Ambience, it’s a product enabler. The systems you build will help us earn—and keep—the trust of the country’s largest health systems.

You’ll have meaningful ownership, direct access to leadership, and the opportunity to define product security at a company where it truly matters. You’ll join a small, high-trust team working on technically deep, mission-critical problems.

Life at Ambience:

Working at Ambience means opting into a high-ownership, high-trust environment built for people who want to grow fast, operate decisively and focus on work that matters. This could be the right place for you if you want to

• Work on mission-critical AI technology that directly improves clinicians’ day-to-day lives and health system financial health across some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in the world.
• Join a “dream team” culture where we hire exceptional people, expect exceptional outcomes and invest deeply in feedback and continuous growth. We operate as a championship team, and that means being ok with hard, uncomfortable, ambiguous problems that lead to real greatness.
• Operate with real ownership and accountability in an environment where there are no bystanders: If something is broken, we fix it! You will have meaningful autonomy and be expected to drive work to completion.

To help you do your best work, we pair these expectations with benefits intentionally designed to help you feel supported and safe at Ambience and beyond. Some of our key benefits include

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• 401(k) with a company match of up to 3% of base salary
• A remote-friendly culture (with a San Francisco HQ) and full equipment provisioning to ensure you can work effectively from wherever you’re based.
• Parental leave to support your family needs
• Annual company-wide off-sites, team off-sites and regular team lunches and all-hands gatherings, with travel, lodging and meals covered
• Flexible time off with no annual cap, company-wide holidays and an annual holiday shutdown from December 24–January 1 designed to support real rest and long-term sustainability.