Senior Application Security Engineer

About the role

As our Senior Application Security Engineer, you'll be the technical owner of application and product security at Starburst — one person with outsized impact, backed by automation and AI rather than a large team. This is deep, hands-on engineering work: you'll build secure-by-default patterns into how our engineers design and ship, embed security controls earlier in the development lifecycle, and create the automation that lets you cover a large engineering organization. You'll get to stand up autonomous red-teaming and threat hunting against our own products, run vulnerability management across both our self-managed enterprise platform and our SaaS, and advance our software supply chain security. Because our biggest customers are global banks, you'll also be in the room with them, explaining how we secure what we ship — the kind of high-trust, high-stakes conversation that makes this work matter.

If you want to make products secure by design rather than chase what's already broken, own a program end to end, and use AI to build defensive tools, this is your opportunity. You'll work closely with Engineering, Product, and the field.

As a Senior Application Security Engineer at Starburst you will:

• Own and mature the Application Security program, moving it from established practice to measurable, automated, and scaled across a large engineering organization.
• Shift security left into the SDLC, embedding secure-by-default patterns, guardrails, threat modeling, and automated checks into design and development (including for AI-assisted development) so issues are prevented rather than found late.
• Build autonomous red-teaming and threat hunting against our own products, using AI and automation to continuously probe for weaknesses instead of relying on point-in-time testing.
• Own vulnerability management for everything we ship across our self-managed enterprise platform and SaaS product — container images, third-party dependencies, and first-party code — automating detection, triage, and routing, and advancing remediation through reachability/exploitability analysis and attack-surface reduction.
• Own application and supply chain security tooling (SAST, SCA, DAST, container scanning), plus third-party penetration testing and the Vulnerability Disclosure Program.
• Be the security voice with customers and leadership, working directly with enterprise customers on posture and assurance, and reporting on product security in executive, customer, and audit conversations.

Some of the things we look for:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, MIS, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5-7 years of experience in application security, product security, software engineering with a security focus, or a related technical role.
• Deep command of application and product security fundamentals, with the judgment to distinguish real exploitability from scanner noise.
• Proven experience embedding security into the SDLC and getting engineering teams to actually adopt it — plus building and scaling processes that raise a program's overall maturity.
• Demonstrated experience running vulnerability management for shipped software at scale, with strong knowledge of container/image security and JVM dependency and supply chain risk.
• Offensive security experience and a drive to automate it: red-teaming, or threat hunting against your own products.
• Threat modeling experience on distributed systems and data platforms, and a strong bias toward automation, including using AI to scale security work.
• Experience in enterprise B2B software and working directly with enterprise customers on security, ideally in regulated industries such as financial services.
• Experience leading and mentoring engineers.
• Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.