Senior Security Engineer

About the role

Government technology has failed citizens, veterans, public servants, and service members for decades.

Kaizen powers America’s application layer. We replace the legacy systems federal agencies run on with modern software, built with craft. The ticketing platform a resident uses to visit a presidential library. The marketplace DoW uses to procure counter-drone systems to protect lives and critical infrastructure. The system a Veteran uses to access benefits. We build systems of record, of national consequence. Our AI-native modules and harness allow us to do so in weeks, not years.

This year, our revenue has grown 35x. Next year, our software will serve over 100 million Americans across dozens of federal agencies.

Founded in 2022 and based in New York City and DC, Kaizen has raised $35 million from NEA, a16z, Accel, 776, and Carpenter Capital.

THE ROLE

Kaizen's platform reaches 40M residents across 50+ agencies in 17 states. We've already signed multiple federal customers with many more in the pipeline, and the work of making Kaizen federal-ready is currently spread across a handful of engineers. That doesn't scale. We're hiring our first dedicated security engineer to sit on the platform team and own this end to end: architect the controls, write the SSPs, and partner with engineering to embed compliance into how we ship rather than bolt it on after.

LOCATION

This is a hybrid role based out of our New York or DC. Candidates must reside or be able to commute to New York City or DC to work out of our office at least four times a week (Monday - Thursday).

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Architect and operationalize security across infrastructure, platform, CI/CD, and application layers, with a focus on AWS (including GovCloud) and Terraform

- Lead readiness across federal compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, CMMC, and DoD Impact Levels), translating NIST 800-53 and related controls into real engineering implementations, and owning the SSPs, POA&Ms, and technical policy documentation

- Build continuous compliance and audit-readiness workflows that make accreditation a byproduct of how we ship, not a separate workstream

- Be smart about AI and tooling. Use automated AI-driven security scanning, modern hardened-image platforms like Chainguard, and other leverage points to multiply the impact of a small security team

- Establish secure software supply chain practices: SBOMs, image signing, workload identity, and hardened deployment pipelines

- Own the technical relationship with assessors, auditors, and federal security stakeholders. You are the credible technical voice in those rooms

- Drive a secure-by-default engineering culture so residents and public servants can trust the systems we put in front of them

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- 5+ years of hands-on experience building and securing cloud-native platforms in AWS and Terraform. You can architect controls and also implement them yourself