Staff Application Security Engineer

Role Overview

The Staff Application Security Engineer leads application security strategy for Apollo’s Security department and delivers it through hands-on work and technical leadership. This role takes on the hardest AppSec problems across product, platform, and AI-powered features, including problems with no established playbook.

The role shapes the roadmaps of Engineering, Product, and Platform teams so secure patterns become the default, and sets the AppSec standard that helps many teams build securely without relying on any single person.

Key Responsibilities

AppSec strategy, standards, and influence

• Lead Apollo’s multi-year AppSec strategy and turn it into multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives that move Security department KRs. Report progress, risks, and tradeoffs to Security leadership on a regular cadence.
• Shape Engineering, Product, Platform, and Data roadmaps so security work is planned in early, and represent AppSec in cross-department decisions.
• Set the secure design, code review, and risk model standards used across the department and adjacent engineering teams, including expectations for AI-generated and agent-generated code.
• Mentor senior engineers and security champions, grow the champions program, and help raise the hiring bar, so the AppSec program does not depend on one person’s expertise.

Secure architecture and vulnerability depth

• Lead security architecture reviews and threat modeling for ambiguous, high-scale, multi-team systems, including AI and agent features, and define the approach where no precedent exists.
• Design and drive adoption of secure-by-default building blocks, such as shared authorization, safe OAuth and token handling, and SSRF-safe HTTP clients, so whole classes of issues stop appearing.
• Shape vulnerability management across internal reviews, bug bounty, pentests, and SCA and runtime findings, with a focus on root causes, bug classes, and clear risk-based severity decisions.
• Stay hands-on for the hardest cases: read code across teams, develop exploits, test bypasses, and lead variant analysis and staged remediation across teams.

Tooling, automation, and AI (AI-native by default)

• Set the standard for AI-augmented AppSec in the department. Use AI and agents for code review, threat modeling, triage, and remediation, and build automation that teams outside Security adopt, with measured gains in speed, coverage, and signal quality.
• Define how Apollo secures its AI systems and agent features, including input and output handling, AI-exposed APIs, prompt and response guardrails, tool permissions, and data-exfiltration paths.

What Good Looks Like (drafted from your mission and success sections)

• Owns AppSec strategy across a multi-year horizon and gets it committed in other teams’ roadmaps.
• Solves ambiguous, no-playbook problems and defines the approach for others to follow.
• Makes hard risk calls under ambiguity and aligns technical and non-technical leaders without formal authority.
• Builds guardrails, standards, and people so AppSec scales beyond any one person.

Required Skills & Experience

• A track record of leading AppSec strategy that changed how several engineering teams build, with measurable results, typically backed by 10+ years in software engineering or application security.
• Expert code review, penetration testing, and exploit development skills, with the ability to find design flaws in unfamiliar codebases and land fixes that hold up against bypass attempts.
• Strong software development skills and the ability to ship production code. Ruby and Ruby on Rails experience is highly valuable, and Python is a plus. Strong Linux and cloud fundamentals, ideally GCP and Kubernetes.
• Deep experience with secure architecture and authentication and authorization patterns, and with building security building blocks that other teams adopt.
• Hands-on experience securing AI-powered systems or agent features, and a clear point of view on how AI changes application security.
• The judgment to make hard risk calls under ambiguity, and the influence to align technical and non-technical leaders without formal authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading security for AI-native products, internal agents, or AI-assisted engineering workflows at scale.
• Experience building or scaling a security champions or developer enablement program.
• Public security work, such as CVEs, research, talks, or open-source tools, or certifications such as OSCP or OSWE.

Example Success Outcomes

• An AppSec strategy tied to Security department KRs, with supporting work committed in other teams’ roadmaps.
• A measurable drop in high-risk vulnerability classes, backed by shared guardrails or libraries.
• AI-assisted AppSec workflows adopted by teams outside Security, with clear gains in speed or signal quality.

Our Tech Stack

React on the front end; Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Python, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch on the backend; Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform in infrastructure; GCP for cloud.