Software Engineer, Security

About this role

ABOUT US

At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We partner with industry leaders such as SoftBank, Uber, Rivian, CLEAR, and Sutter Health. 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 Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. 

SOFTWARE ENGINEER, SECURITY

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 that make Sierra’s platform secure by default — spanning agent safety/security, privacy, identity, authentication, authorization, and data security. You’ll work across all layers of production (agents, infrastructure, backend, frontend) to embed security-conscious design into the core of our product.

Own Cross-Cutting Systems. Partner with product and platform teams to implement and evolve Sierra’s trust primitives: identity management, access control, auditability, and data lifecycle management. You’ll make pragmatic design trade-offs between usability, performance, and security.

Secure Agentic AI Systems.

Build controls that ensure AI agents can't leak customer data, execute unauthorized actions, or be manipulated into unintended behavior. Design runtime policy enforcement for tool use, implement safe agent sandboxing, and create boundaries that protect data while keeping agents powerful and useful.

Automate and Scale Security-Adjacent Workflows. Create developer-friendly tooling to reduce risk and friction — whether through automating security checks in CI/CD, enforcing privacy boundaries through schema validation, or instrumenting runtime monitoring for sensitive events.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

Strong Software Engineering Skills. Experience building and maintaining production systems. You’re comfortable designing APIs, integrating with authentication or identity frameworks, and thoughtfully using AI-assisted development tools to build, test, and ship high-quality code faster without lowering the quality bar.

Security Mindset. You think like a security engineer — considering how data flows, where it’s stored, who can access it, and how to design for least privilege and transparency.

Product and Platform Mindset. You care about building secure scalable systems that enable, not block, innovation. You work closely with product teams to make trade-offs clear and help them move quickly without sacrificing trust.

Curiosity and Ownership. You take ambiguous, cross-cutting problems from first principles to production and go deep when needed: tracing an authorization decision from agent intent through policy enforcement and downstream effects, or following sensitive data across model context, logs, storage, and tenant boundaries. You define the problem, align partners, ship the solution, and own it in production.

EVEN BETTER IF…

- You’ve worked on privacy, identity, trust & safety, authN/authz, or data protection systems.

- You’ve built security frameworks, libraries, or tooling that developers actually use or integrated security automation into CI/CD pipelines.

- You have exposure to AI systems or care about designing secure-by-default LLM applications.

- You think like an attacker — you naturally ask "what could go wrong?" when reviewing designs or while building systems. You've found or fixed real security issues in production systems.

- 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

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