Security Engineer
At its midpoint, $310k/yr, this role pays more than the $212k/yr midpoint for Security Engineering openings today (usual band $175k–$375k/yr).
The full posting
About us
Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands - including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank - to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.
We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.
Sierra was co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor who first met while working together at Google over 20 years ago. Bret currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Open AI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook. Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs.
Security Engineer
Security Engineering builds the foundations that let Sierra deliver powerful AI agents while protecting customer data and trust. We partner across product and platform to make security, privacy, and safety core product capabilities and secure defaults.
What you’ll do
Our work spans several security domains. You’ll go deep where your strengths and interests are strongest, with opportunities to explore new areas alongside the team.
Build the Foundations of Trust.
Design and ship systems and controls that make Sierra secure by default - spanning product security, infrastructure security, enterprise security, identity, and detection and response. You’ll work across all layers of our platform to identify risk, strengthen architectures, and build durable defenses.
Own Cross-Cutting Systems.
Partner with product, platform, and infrastructure team to threat model designs, review code and architectures, and implement and evolve Sierra’s security primitives. You’ll make pragmatic design trade-offs between usability, performance, reliability, and security.
Find and Reduce Real Risk.
Identify vulnerabilities, investigate suspicious behavior, and improve detections and response workflows across applications, cloud infrastructure, identity, endpoints, and internal systems. Turn what you learn into systemic fixes and controls that prevent entire classes of issues.
Automate and Scale Security Workflows.
Create developer-friendly tooling to reduce risk and friction - whether through automating security checks in CI/CD, building secure paved paths, improving vulnerability discovery, or instrumenting high-signal detection and response.
Deep Security Expertise.
Strong security fundamentals and depth in at least one domain, such as product security, platform or cloud security, enterprise security, identity, detection and response, or offensive security. You can apply that expertise across unfamiliar systems and emerging threats.
Product and Platform Mindset.
You care about building secure, scalable systems that enable , not block, innovation. You work closely with teams across Sierra to make trade-offs clear and help them move quickly without sacrificing trust.
Software Engineering and Systems Thinking.
You’re comfortable reading and writing code, understanding how production systems fit together, and building pragmatic software solutions to security problems. You can reason about system design and contribute to APIs, services, and security controls, with an eye toward reliability and maintainability.
Curiosity and Ownership.
You take ambiguous, cross-cutting problems from first principles to production and go deep when needed: threat modeling a distributed system, tracing an authorization decision across services, or following an investigation from weak signal to root cause. You define the problem, align partners, build the solution, and own it in production.
Even better if…
- You’ve worked across more than one of product security , infrastructure security , enterprise security , detection and response , or offensive security .
- You’ve built security frameworks, platforms, or solutions that engineers and responders rely on to prevent, detect, investigate, and remediate security issues at scale.
- You have exposure to AI systems or care about designing secure-by-default LLM applications and agentic systems .
- You think like an attacker - you naturally ask “what could go wrong?” when reviewing designs or investigating systems. You’ve found or fixed real security issues in production.
- You thrive in 0→1 environments , where foundational systems have to balance speed, reliability, and trust.
Our values
- Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.
- Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.
- Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.
- Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.
- Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.
What we offer
We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:
- Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
- Life insurance and disability benefits
- Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
- Parental leave
- Fertility and family building benefits
- Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized when working onsite
- Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
- Free alphorn lessons
These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region and employment type, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.
Be you, with us
We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply through the link on this page even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description.
Sierra is a proud equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws, including veteran status and disability status. Hiring decisions are made by people, based on merit. If you need a reasonable accommodation for a disability, a religious practice, pregnancy or any related condition at any point in the application or interview process, contact us at accommodations@sierra.ai. Requests are handled confidentially and do not affect your candidacy.
We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with applicable fair chance laws.
Text as Sierra published it; last compared with the original on 11 Nov 2026.
The application
Your details, CV and LinkedIn, then 8 questions (1 written).
- 1.Are you able to work from a Sierra office listed for this role?Pick one
- 2.Are you legally authorized to work in the United States?Yes or no
- 3.Will you now or in the future require visa sponsorship to work in the United States?Yes or no
- 4.Are you fluent in any of these languages?Pick any (29 options) · optional
- 5.We use Metaview, an AI notetaking tool, to streamline interviews by recording and summarizing discussions, enabling interviewers to be fully present without manual notetaking. With your approval, it silently records notes during interviews.Yes or no
- 6.What's your favorite junk food?Short answer · optional
- 7.Trust is one of Sierra’s values. I confirm that the information I provide is true, complete, and reflects my own experience and thinking, and I understand that an offer may be withdrawn, or employment ended, if Sierra learns otherwise.Pick any
- 8.Anything else? (Optional)Written answer · optional
Taken from Sierra's application form as it stood on 11 Nov 2026.
The employer: Sierra
Sierra's conversational agents serve customers on behalf of large brands; its security engineers and program staff protect those agents and the data they touch.
Pay and benefits: San Francisco or London roles with equity in a highly valued startup.
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