Staff Application Security Engineer

About the role

Vestwell is the financial technology company powering the new savings economy. The New York City-based fintech platform redefines how people save for the critical aspects of life across retirement, education, and healthcare savings needs. Today, Vestwell enables over 790,000 businesses and more than 2.75 million active savers, with over $57 billion in assets saved across all 50 United States.

Vestwell offers a range of products, including workplace-delivered retirement plans, employer-offered student loan repayment benefits, and various savings accounts for education, emergencies, and individuals with disabilities.

Vestwell's platform serves a diverse clientele, including financial advisers, employers, third-party administrators, financial institutions, payroll providers, government agencies, and individual savers. To learn more, visit vestwell.com

Who Are We Looking For?

We are looking for a Staff Application Security Engineer to help secure the applications and identity integrations that power our products. This role will focus on analyzing and protecting our NestJS applications, strengthening application security practices across the software development lifecycle, and owning the security of our identity capabilities as both an identity provider (IdP) and a relying party (RP) in OIDC integrations and internal application usage.

You will work closely with software engineering, platform, infrastructure, and product teams to identify risk early, design practical mitigations, and make secure-by-default development easier. The ideal candidate combines strong hands-on application security skills with deep knowledge of modern authentication and authorization protocols.

What Will You Be Doing?

- Analyze NestJS and TypeScript applications for authentication, authorization, input validation, injection, session, API, business-logic, and data-protection vulnerabilities.

- Establish and evolve secure development patterns for NestJS, including guards, interceptors, middleware, decorators, validation, error handling, logging, configuration, and dependency management.

- Own or contribute to the security architecture of our OIDC integrations and identity platform capabilities when we operate as:

- An identity provider, including authorization, token, user-info, discovery, key-set, and logout endpoints.

- A relying party, including client registration, redirect handling, authorization-code flows, token exchange, session establishment, and logout.

- Design, review, and assess OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect flows, including authorization code with PKCE, refresh tokens, client authentication, scopes, consent, state, nonce, redirect URI validation, token lifetimes, and key rotation.

- Help define and enforce authorization models using RBAC and, where appropriate, claims-based or policy-based access control.

- Review access-control boundaries across services, APIs, tenants, users, roles, permissions, and administrative functions.