Senior Product Security Engineer
The mission of Plaid's Product Security Team is “Improve our customer’s trust by assuring secure development and delivery of products and services, minimizing risk to the ecosystem, and preventing security incidents."
Plaid's Product Security team helps engineering teams build secure products and continuously identify and reduce security risks. Our work spans security architecture and design, application security, vulnerability management, supply chain security, and security automation.
We work directly with product and engineering teams to identify risks early, influence secure architecture, and define security requirements. We build and leverage automated security capabilities to expand testing coverage, validate fixes, and reduce recurring vulnerabilities. As AI accelerates software development, our goal is to help Plaid maintain strong security without relying on manual reviews for every change.
This role is perfect for you if:
- You enjoy understanding complex products and systems and finding security risks that are not immediately obvious.
- You have strong application security fundamentals and are comfortable working directly with code and architecture.
- You enjoy working closely with engineers and product teams to solve security problems early in development.
- You can evaluate technical and business tradeoffs and influence architectural decisions.
- You are excited about how AI is changing software development and how we approach product security.
ABOUT THE ROLE:
- Lead security architecture and design reviews for high-priority Plaid products, working directly with engineering and product teams from early development through launch.
- Conduct threat modeling and technical security assessments of complex applications, APIs, distributed systems, and product workflows to identify material security risks.
- Evaluate authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, sensitive data flows, and business logic to identify potential vulnerabilities and abuse cases.
- Review application code, investigate security weaknesses, and validate that proposed fixes address the underlying risks.
- Assess security implications of new technologies and product capabilities, including AI-powered applications and agentic workflows.
- Partner with engineering leadership to prioritize material security risks, agree on mitigations, and track them through remediation or approved risk acceptance.
- Identify recurring security weaknesses, define reusable security requirements and secure design patterns, and partner with engineering teams to implement preventive controls.
- Leverage AI-assisted security analysis and testing to continuously improve security assessments and validate important security assumptions.
MUST HAVES:
- 5+ years of experience in product or application security, with strong expertise in secure architecture, application security fundamentals, and technical risk assessment.
- Experience leading security design reviews and threat modeling for complex applications, APIs, or distributed systems.
- Deep understanding of authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, sensitive data protection, and common application security vulnerabilities.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to read application code, analyze vulnerability paths, and evaluate security fixes.
- Experience assessing security risks in cloud-native applications and understanding the security implications of system architecture and implementation decisions.
- Ability to communicate complex security risks, recommend practical mitigations, and influence engineering and product leadership.
- Ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments and collaborate effectively across teams.
Nice to have:
- Experience securing AI-powered applications or agentic systems.
- Experience with penetration testing, vulnerability research, or security testing of complex business logic.
- Experience securing financial technology products or systems handling sensitive or regulated data.