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.