Lead Security Engineer

Benepass is a fintech company focused on making benefits easy for organizations by allowing them to tailor offerings to their workforce's unique needs. As a Lead Security Engineer, you will build and scale security practices to protect sensitive data while collaborating with various teams to implement effective security measures.

Responsibilities:

• Build, operationalize, and scale the security engineering practices that protect our benefits platform and the sensitive employee, benefits, and financial data it processes
• Work across application security, cloud security, security architecture, supply chain security, detection engineering, and vulnerability management
• Partner deeply with the teams building our web and mobile applications, backend services, system integrations, card and banking workflows, infrastructure as code, and data platforms to turn risk reduction into scalable guardrails, automated controls, and clear engineering guidance
• Set direction and mature security capabilities
• Introduce strong standards, ship incremental improvements, and ensure secure paths for engineers without creating a centralized approval queue

Requirements:

• 7+ years in security engineering, application security, cloud security, product security, platform security, or closely related technical security roles, ideally in a high-growth SaaS or technology company
• Proven ability to lead broad security engineering initiatives as a senior IC, influence cross-functional technical decisions, and move work from strategy to production implementation
• Strong working knowledge of secure SDLC practices, secure design review, threat modeling, API security, code scanning, SAST, CI/CD security integrations, security testing, defect management, and vulnerability remediation workflows
• Hands-on experience with AWS-native security patterns and services, including IAM, KMS, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, VPC segmentation, WAF, Secrets Manager, S3/RDS encryption, infrastructure-as-code security, container orchestration security, and cloud posture management
• Ability to guide secure system builds involving access control, encryption standards, key and certificate management, vaulting, secrets management, and managed HSM/KMS-backed cryptographic services
• Experience hardening build, test, and deployment workflows through dependency scanning, SBOMs, artifact signing, secret scanning, CI/CD guardrails, least-privilege automation, and container security controls
• Ability to use frameworks such as NIST CSF 2.0 and OWASP SAMM pragmatically to assess current state, sequence improvements, define metrics, and mature security practices iteratively
• Clear communicator who can partner with engineering, product, platform, compliance, and business teams; write practical guidance; teach developers; and create durable security champions programs
• Strong judgment in prioritizing technical risk reduction, managing ambiguity, documenting decisions, and building lightweight processes that scale with the company
• Experience securing fintech, benefits, payroll, payments, or other regulated SaaS platforms that process PII, financial data, HRIS data, transaction data, or customer administrative workflows
• Familiarity with SOC 2, HITRUST, PCI, or similar compliance and audit programs, with the ability to support evidence and control design while staying focused on technical risk reduction
• Experience with AWS serverless and managed-service architectures, including API Gateway, Cognito, Lambda, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, Transfer Family, CloudFront, and event-driven security monitoring patterns
• Background with mobile application security for iOS and Android, including secure token handling, platform keychain/keystore patterns, OTA update risk, and mobile API abuse prevention
• Experience with detection-as-code, SIEM/SOAR workflows, security data pipelines, incident response automation, or measurable improvements to alert quality and response readiness
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, policy-as-code, CSPM/CWPP tools, container image scanning, runtime security, or Kubernetes/ECS hardening
• Experience designing developer education, secure coding workshops, security champions programs, or other scalable practices that improve security outcomes without slowing delivery
• Experience defining practical governance for LLMs, AI coding assistants, prompt/data handling, model/tool approval, and sensitive data protection in AI-enabled software development workflows