Vercel is an agentic infrastructure company that shapes how the web is built. They are seeking a Product Security Engineer to drive critical security initiatives across their products and platform, focusing on threat modeling, secure code review, and open-source security management.
Responsibilities:
- Partner with engineering and product teams to perform threat modeling for new and existing features. Identify potential risks early in the design phase and recommend security controls or design changes to mitigate threats. You will ensure security concerns are addressed from the inception of features through deployment
- Conduct secure code reviews and security assessments on products and services built with Next.js, Node.js, and our serverless backend. You’ll uncover code-level vulnerabilities, provide actionable remediation guidance to developers, and establish best practices for secure coding across the engineering team
- Oversee Vercel’s open-source security efforts. This includes monitoring and coordinating fixes for vulnerabilities in third-party open-source packages we use (as a consumer) and ensuring the security of the open-source projects we maintain and publish (as a contributor/publisher, e.g. Next.js). You will work with maintainers and the community on responsible disclosure and patching of security issues in open-source code
- Evaluate, select, and integrate security tools into our Software Development Life Cycle. You will drive the implementation of automated security checks – for example, using GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) and other static analysis, dependency scanning, and secret detection tools – directly in our CI/CD pipelines and GitHub workflows. By embedding security tooling into developer workflows, you will help catch issues early and reduce manual effort
- Own and expand Vercel’s bug bounty program. You will triage and validate incoming vulnerability reports from the security researcher community, ensure critical issues are promptly addressed, and coordinate cross-team efforts to remediate and learn from reported vulnerabilities. You’ll also work on making our bug bounty a world-class, researcher-friendly program, including refining policies, scope, and engagement to encourage high-quality submissions
- Lead and contribute to security projects that span multiple teams and disciplines. For example, you might drive a company-wide upgrade to a more secure framework, implement a new authentication/authorization mechanism in collaboration with product teams, or roll out a security awareness program for engineers. You will act as a security champion across the org, aligning stakeholders from Engineering, DevOps, Product, and other groups to implement lasting security improvements
- Work closely with customer success and product marketing on security-related initiatives that impact our users. This may involve contributing to security documentation and whitepapers, assisting with customer security questionnaires or audits by providing product security expertise, and communicating our security features and best practices to build customer trust in the platform
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience in a Product Security or Product Security role (or related field), with a track record of securing web products and services
- Strong familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js runtime security
- Experience with modern web frameworks (ideally Next.js or React and Node-based frameworks) and understanding of their security considerations
- Demonstrated ability to perform threat modeling and architectural risk analysis for complex product
- Experience implementing or working with secure development lifecycle practices (secure design, code review, pentesting, etc.) is required
- Hands-on experience with product security tooling such as static product security testing (SAST), dynamic testing (DAST), dependency vulnerability scanners, and CI/CD pipeline security integration
- Knowledge of open-source security best practices
- Exposure to running or participating in a bug bounty program or vulnerability disclosure process
- Solid understanding of cloud architecture and serverless environments from a security perspective
- Proven ability to drive security initiatives and influence engineering teams to adopt best practices
- Experience with GitHub Advanced Security or similar tools for code scanning and secret detection
- Experience dealing with open-source dependencies and package management security (e.g., handling vulnerability advisories, using tools like Dependabot or Snyk)
- Bonus if you have contributed to or maintained open-source projects, especially security-related ones
- Stay up-to-date on the latest vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10, emerging threats) and methods to mitigate them
- Experience with related cloud security concepts or tools
- Prior software development experience beyond security (e.g. as a frontend or backend engineer)
- Hold relevant security certifications or recognitions (for example, OSCP, OSWE, CISSP, or notable bug bounty hall of fame entries)
- Experience with security policy-as-code or infrastructure as code security (for instance, using tools like Open Policy Agent, Terraform security checks, etc.)
- Have built or implemented security features in a product (such as authentication systems, encryption, secure CI/CD pipelines) or contributed to security community projects/tools
- Are an active participant in the security community (e.g., contributing to open source security projects, writing blog posts or research, attending or speaking at security conferences)