Founding Security Engineer

About the role

As a Founding Security Engineer at Forus, you will build the security foundation for a company using AI to remove the barriers between patients and medicine. Our platform handles protected health information and powers time-sensitive access workflows across providers, payers, and life sciences partners. Security is therefore both a technical requirement and a prerequisite for earning the trust that lets us scale.

This is a broad, deeply technical role. You will own cloud and infrastructure security across AWS and GCP, build security into the product, secure how our AI systems handle sensitive data, and establish detection and incident response, including the audit trails that show how protected data is accessed. As our first security engineer, you will make foundational architecture decisions, build the secure primitives other engineers use, and set the technical bar for how Forus scales.

This is a demanding role, with a high level of autonomy and responsibility. You will be expected to act like an owner and commit yourself to Forus' success. If you are low-ego, hungry to learn, and excited about intense, impactful work that drives both company growth and accelerated career progression, we want to hear from you.

What you'll do

• Own cloud and infrastructure security across AWS and GCP, including guardrails, identity and network architecture, secrets management, and secure-by-default primitives
• Build security into product architecture and development workflows through secure design reviews, code review, authentication and authorization hardening, and reusable tooling that makes the secure path the easiest one
• Establish detection, logging, audit trails, and incident response for systems handling protected health information, and lead the technical response when something goes wrong
• Secure our corporate and identity surface, including SSO, device and endpoint security, SaaS hardening, and access across the employee lifecycle
• Design isolation and data-flow controls for agentic AI systems, defending against sensitive-data leakage across model pipelines and tool use
• Build the automation and security-as-code that lets engineers move quickly while implementing the technical controls behind SOC 2, HIPAA, and HITRUST
• Partner with Legal, Compliance, and GTM to translate regulatory and customer requirements into practical controls that we can ship

We'll be most excited if you have

• 7+ years in security engineering, grounded in a strong software engineering foundation. You design and implement systems, not just review them
• Deep, hands-on cloud security experience across AWS and/or GCP, including infrastructure as code and building security foundations rather than only configuring managed services
• Range across infrastructure, application, identity, and detection and response, with the judgment to operate as the first security engineer
• Experience protecting sensitive data at scale; experience with PHI, HIPAA, or similarly regulated data is a strong plus
• Comfort designing security controls for LLMs, AI agents, and the data flows around them
• A track record of moving quickly, finding shortcuts, and going to unreasonable lengths to deliver on goals
• High NPS with your former teammates

Working with us

Forus is based in New York, with our full team working out of a beautiful and spacious office in SoHo. We run as a high-trust environment with high autonomy, which requires that everyone is fully competent and operates in line with our principles:

• Do the math. Be rigorous, assume nothing. Break problems down and reason from the ground up. Stay open to changing your mind.
• Resourceful optimism. Assume problems are solvable. Be audacious. Resist false constraints and push beyond the obvious before deciding.
• Spit it out. Speak directly, invite critique, avoid equivocation. We want right answers, not comfortable ones.
• All killer, no filler. Raise the bar. Hold a high standard for your pace and execution, and elevate the performance of the team around you.
• Mamba mentality. Fight for users. Start with users' realities, not ours. Resist optimizing for internal convenience over user outcomes.

Benefits

• Fully covered medical, vision, and dental insurance
• Memberships for One Medical, Talkspace, Teladoc, and Kindbody
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO) and 16 weeks of parental leave
• 401K plan setup, FSA option, commuter benefits, and DashPass
• Lunch at the office every day and Dinner at the office after 6:30 pm

Pay

We provide competitive compensation with meaningful equity (for full-time employees). Everyone who joins will be a major contributor to our success, and we reflect this through ownership and pay. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our company's size and industry, and are one part of the total compensation package that also includes equity, benefits, and other opportunities at Forus (for full-time employees). Individual pay decisions are ultimately based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, geography, and balancing internal equity.