Security Engineer

THE OPPORTUNITY

Apollo Research works with most frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others) to test their models before deployment and collaborate on fundamental scheming research. Our coding agent security product, Watcher, is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and enterprises.

Security exists at Apollo to safeguard the trust our lab partners place in us and to enable that research. Our own team runs around 400 billion tokens a month through AI agents, which makes Apollo both a target and a testbed. We’re hiring Security Engineers to join the Infra & Security Team.

In this role, you will design, implement, and deploy the security controls that keep Apollo secure, and make the secure path the default path for everyone. You will build the security layer for a novel insider risk that didn't exist before.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design, build, and operate Apollo's core security controls: identity and access management, infrastructure and cloud security, endpoint management, and incident response.

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Build paved roads that make the secure path the default, easy path

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Establish and advocate for security practices across Apollo, and build the organizational trust needed for people to adopt them, communicating security decisions and tradeoffs clearly along the way.

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Evaluate vendors and tooling, make build-vs-buy calls on security infrastructure, and assess vendor security posture before adoption.

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Lead major security projects end to end, from ideation through implementation and rollout.

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Collaboratively define and shape the security roadmap and priorities.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

Must-haves

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5+ years in security roles in a hands-on technical capacity (not purely GRC/compliance). You'd need to be able to think structurally about threat modeling and failure modes. You need to be able to read code, understand infrastructure, and evaluate technical controls.

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Engineering mindset. You treat security as an engineering problem. You are capable of, and willing to, build custom solutions when the task demands it, rather than relying on 'glueing' together off-the-shelf tools. You prioritize automation and systems-level thinking to scale security, and you are comfortable leveraging AI to accelerate development.

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Direct experience with application security, cloud security, or product security. Ideally you’ve owned or significantly contributed to the security posture of an organisation that handles sensitive customer data.

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Influence without authority. You have a track record of building buy-in for security practices and being trusted by non-security people.

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Startup pace. You are excited about a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities, and willing to grind when it matters.

Nice-to-haves

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• Software engineering experience
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• Experience implementing zero-trust architectures
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• Experience with sandboxing
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• Experience with detection engineering
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• Experience with GRC engineering
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• Experience with incident response
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• Hands-on experience with endpoint management (Kandji, Jamf, or similar)
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• Experience with identity/access management
• Explicitly not required
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• Deep AI/ML security or LLM-specific expertise
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• Formal AI safety research background. We need security practitioners who can learn the AI safety context, not AI safety researchers who need to learn security.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

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Zero trust migration: Design and deliver an incremental path from Apollo's current cloud architecture toward zero trust, including hands-on implementation and deployment reducing the blast radius if any single credential, device, or agent is compromised.

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Agentic SOC: Design and build an internal agentic SOC from scratch; automate triage and investigation of security alerts so detection coverage scales with Apollo's growing use of AI agents.

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Sandbox hardening: Review Apollo's sandboxing infrastructure; propose and implement changes that improve security while minimizing impact on researcher productivity.

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Third-party access review: Implement a lean, streamlined access review process for third-party software that people will actually use.

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Incident response: Lead an incident response effort end to end: containment, root cause, and the post-mortem that turns it into a durable fix.

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Pentesting tooling: Decide which agentic pentesting solution Apollo will use, and whether to build or buy.

BENEFITS

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• This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
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• Salary: San Francisco : $214,000 – $280,000; London : £144,000 – £188,000

• Our engineers effectively have an unlimited token budget. If a better result costs more compute, use it.

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• Flexible work hours and schedule
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• Unlimited vacation
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• Unlimited sick leave
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• Up to 6 months of paid parental leave
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• Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance
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• Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)
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• Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays
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• Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences
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• A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget
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• Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)

LOGISTICS

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Time Allocation: Full-time

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Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and some wfh arrangements.

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Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.