Senior Security Engineer

What we’re looking for:

We need a software engineer with 4+ years of experience (with security experience) who can own Poetic’s entire security posture from day one. You should be a builder first — someone who writes the tooling that prevents mistakes rather than just the policy that forbids them — and have real experience across application security, infrastructure hardening, and compliance programs (SOC 2, PCI). You must have audit experience — having run or participated in audits and worked directly with auditors. Bonus points if you’ve secured multi-tenant AI systems or worked in regulated verticals like fintech, insurance, or healthcare.

What you’ll do:

• Own security end-to-end as Poetic’s first dedicated security hire — product security, corporate security, information security, and compliance

• Build internal security tooling that makes secure-by-default behavior the path of least resistance for the broader platform engineering team (6 staff+ engineers today)

• Harden infrastructure underpinning Poetic’s AI runtime — multi-tenant isolation, secrets management, network boundaries, and data pipelines touching regulated customer environments

• Lead threat modeling, secure code review, and vulnerability management — building security into the development lifecycle, not bolting it on after the fact

• Own the audit and compliance workstream (SOC 2, PCI) — run audits end-to-end, work directly with auditors, and build automation to reduce compliance process workload

• Make code contributions to the platform — build ways to make Poetic more secure by default and automate compliance processes

• Communicate with enterprise customer security teams to ensure and articulate Poetic’s security posture meets Fortune 500 standards

• Be the internal voice on security — help the team understand tradeoffs, find paths that satisfy both security and velocity, and build trust by being helpful rather than being a gate

About the team & role:

• You’ll join the broader platform engineering team (6 people, all staff+ level)

• This is the first security-focused hire — you’ll build the security program from scratch

• The scope extends beyond pure security into compliance and information security across the company

• Poetic’s runtime executes complex AI workflows against sensitive enterprise data (financial records, insurance claims, telecom operations) across distributed environments — the security surface is broad and genuinely interesting

About Poetic:

Poetic (formerly Forge) is turning the world’s hardest processes into English software. We’re deployed globally, powering critical workflows for Fortune 500 companies with 98%+ quality across over half a million production runs. Series A at a $500M valuation, backed by Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and OpenAI. ~40 person team, in-person in San Francisco.