Staff Application Security Engineer

About the role

Apollo.io is the leading go-to-market solution for revenue teams, trusted by over 500,000 companies and millions of users globally, from rapidly growing startups to some of the world's largest enterprises. Founded in 2015, the company is one of the fastest growing companies in SaaS, raising approximately $250 million to date and valued at $1.6 billion. Apollo.io provides sales and marketing teams with easy access to verified contact data for over 210 million B2B contacts and 35 million companies worldwide, along with tools to engage and convert these contacts in one unified platform. By helping revenue professionals find the most accurate contact information and automating the outreach process, Apollo.io turns prospects into customers. Apollo raised a series D in 2023 and is backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and more, and counts the former President and COO of Hubspot, JD Sherman, among its board members.

Role Overview

The Staff Application Security Engineer leads application security strategy for Apollo’s Security department and delivers it through hands-on work and technical leadership. This role takes on the hardest AppSec problems across product, platform, and AI-powered features, including problems with no established playbook.

The role shapes the roadmaps of Engineering, Product, and Platform teams so secure patterns become the default, and sets the AppSec standard that helps many teams build securely without relying on any single person.

Key Responsibilities

AppSec strategy, standards, and influence

- Lead Apollo’s multi-year AppSec strategy and turn it into multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives that move Security department KRs. Report progress, risks, and tradeoffs to Security leadership on a regular cadence.

- Shape Engineering, Product, Platform, and Data roadmaps so security work is planned in early, and represent AppSec in cross-department decisions.

- Set the secure design, code review, and risk model standards used across the department and adjacent engineering teams, including expectations for AI-generated and agent-generated code.

- Mentor senior engineers and security champions, grow the champions program, and help raise the hiring bar, so the AppSec program does not depend on one person’s expertise.

Secure architecture and vulnerability depth

- Lead security architecture reviews and threat modeling for ambiguous, high-scale, multi-team systems, including AI and agent features, and define the approach where no precedent exists.

- Design and drive adoption of secure-by-default building blocks, such as shared authorization, safe OAuth and token handling, and SSRF-safe HTTP clients, so whole classes of issues stop appearing.

- Shape vulnerability management across internal reviews, bug bounty, pentests, and SCA and runtime findings, with a focus on root causes, bug classes, and clear risk-based severity decisions.