Senior Staff AI Security Lead
ionq
United States Posted October 18, 2026
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Salary Range
$180,000 - $225,000
Job Description
Join our security organization as a Senior Staff AI Security Lead. In this hands-on role, you will build the AI infrastructure for our security teams and lead the adoption effort to drive measurable gains across various security functions. You will report to the security leadership team and work closely with multiple departments. Your responsibilities will include designing and building the shared platform for AI applications, establishing patterns for agentic workflows, connecting security knowledge to AI systems, and implementing guardrails for security. You will also identify real use cases for AI in security, deliver high-visibility applications, and run enablement programs to raise AI fluency across the organization.
- Establishing and leading the enterprise AI infrastructure for security teams, ensuring its effective use across various security functions.
- Designing and building the shared platform security teams use to develop AI applications, including model gateway, authentication, and audit logging.
- Identifying and delivering high-visibility AI applications that significantly improve security operations, while also teaching and enabling the organization to adopt AI effectively.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating production systems with large language models — not prototypes or demos. You have shipped something real, dealt with its failure modes, and iterated on it
- Working knowledge of AI-specific risk — prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage through model outputs, insecure agent tool use, model and dependency supply chain — and practical mitigations for each
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and fluency in Python (or an equivalent language), including API design, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Deep understanding of security engineering: identity and access management, secrets management, network boundaries, logging and detection, and secure software development practices
- 8+ years in security engineering, platform engineering, or a closely related technical field, including significant hands-on software development
- Sound judgment about where AI is genuinely useful and where it is not. We want an advocate who is also a skeptic
- Clear written and verbal communication. You can explain a system design to an engineer and the business case for it to an executive, in the same week
- A track record of driving technical change across an organization through influence rather than authority: building consensus, teaching, and shipping things people voluntarily adopt
- Experience with retrieval systems, embeddings, vector databases, and knowledge pipeline design
- Prior experience as a first or founding hire on a platform or capability that later scaled organization-wide
- Experience fine-tuning or evaluating open-weight models for domain-specific tasks
- Familiarity with AI governance and assurance frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, or the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications
- Experience building evaluation frameworks or LLM observability tooling
- Background in security operations, detection engineering, or incident response — you have felt the toil firsthand
- Experience with agent frameworks, orchestration, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or comparable tool-use standards
Required Skills
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