Staff Application Security Engineer

About the role

Aurora's mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. We're looking for a Staff Application Security Engineer with a strong software engineering background to help build and maintain an AI-native application security program for our driverless truck product and supporting infrastructure. This is a builder-first role for someone who enjoys understanding complex systems and working alongside engineers to improve them. You'll collaborate on fixes and design-level improvements, build automation, and make security a low-friction part of the software development lifecycle. You'll use AI thoughtfully to scale your attention while applying your own engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineering teams on fixes and secure design improvements, contributing code directly.
• Investigate findings and their practical impact, bringing clear evidence and possible solutions when engaging the responsible teams.
• Help build and maintain the application security program and its tooling, using AI to scale investigation while validating results.
• Build automation and integrate preventative controls into the software development lifecycle to reduce recurring risks and friction.

Required Qualifications

• Substantial experience building and maintaining production software, with strong programming, debugging, and system design skills.
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar codebases, understand system behavior, and reason about potential misuse.
• Experience delivering technical work across teams in a large or complex engineering organization.
• Demonstrated ability to threat model systems, explain technical risks, and tradeoffs clearly and collaborate with engineers on practical solutions.
• Experience building developer tooling, automation, or software development lifecycle integrations.
• Practical experience using AI to support technical work, with the judgment to validate its output and explain the underlying reasoning.
• Experience with languages in our stack: C, C++, Go, Python, JavaScript, and web frameworks.

Desirable Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building or maintaining both cloud and embedded systems, ideally with deep technical knowledge of each.
• Experience developing software for safety-critical products or their supporting infrastructure, particularly autonomous vehicle technology.
• Application or product security experience, including in-depth code audits, secure design reviews, threat modeling, or vulnerability investigation.
• Experience building and maintaining production AI-assisted security tooling or automation.

Pay

• For roles based in San Francisco, CA, Mountain View, CA, and Seattle, WA: $189,000 - $303,000 per year.
• For roles based in Pittsburgh, PA, Livonia, MI, and Dallas, TX: $171,000 - $273,000 per year.
• Aurora's pay ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, the successful candidate's starting base pay will be determined based on factors including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, relevant education or training, and market conditions.
• The successful candidate will also be eligible for an annual bonus, equity compensation, and benefits.

Schedule

• Hybrid work environment: in office at least 3 days per week.