Staff Software Engineer - Advanced Threat Protection

Overview

Join the Advanced Threat Protection team within Auth0 Customer Identity as a research-focused Security Engineer. Research how attackers will use AI against identity systems, build AI-assisted defenses, and translate forward-looking threat research into protections for products, infrastructure, and customer tenants.

What you'll do

• Research and lead how to use AI to protect customer tenants proactively and during active incidents by accelerating detection, triage, and response.
• Research and build protections against novel AI attacks affecting Auth0 and its customers, including adversarial ML, prompt injection, abuse of agentic protocols, and model and data poisoning.
• Partner with identity security teams to help customers strengthen their tenant security posture through AI-assisted defenses.
• Research the emerging AI threat landscape and translate it into a forward-looking 12–24 month view of threats to protect against.
• Architect, recommend, and build tooling based on that threat research.
• Review and harden Auth0's AI security offering, identifying gaps and recommending mitigations before exploitation.
• Partner across a globally distributed product-aligned team of security engineers to turn research into shipped protections for customer tenants.
• Establish and execute a long-term engineering and threat research roadmap for Advanced Threat Protection aligned with company-wide business and security goals.
• Own high-impact security architecture designs and decisions across Auth0 and Okta Customer Identity infrastructure to support long-term threat resilience.
• Drive cross-functional security strategies and partner across engineering, product, and enterprise security leadership to influence platform-wide standards and policies.
• Coach, mentor, and level up Senior (P3) engineers and team members, fostering technical excellence, research discipline, and leadership growth.

What you'll need

• Hands-on experience with AI/ML security, attacking, defending, or both, including adversarial ML, LLM/prompt-injection attacks, agentic-system or model abuse, and an interest in using AI to build defenses.
• 8+ years of experience in security engineering.
• A proven track record of setting technical vision, driving cross-organizational initiatives, and leading architectural choices in cloud/product security.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring senior-level engineers, defining multi-quarter technical strategy, driving architectural consensus, and influencing cross-organizational security initiatives.
• Hands-on development experience sufficient to prototype tooling, build AI-powered defenses, and operationalize research.
• Working knowledge and hands-on experience with one or more of AWS and/or Azure security or Kubernetes.
• Strong knowledge of OWASP, including the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, and secure coding best practices.
• A strong foundation in secure software development lifecycle best practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to turn research into clear guidance for engineering and product teams.
• Experience working with a globally distributed and remote team.

Nice to have

• Go development experience.
• Published threat research, CVEs, or conference talks in AI/ML security or identity security.
• Experience building AI/ML-powered security tooling or defensive automation in a production environment.
• Working knowledge and experience with one or more of adversarial ML, model red-teaming, or AI safety research.
• Working knowledge and experience with the AI agent / MCP ecosystem and its security implications.
• Working knowledge and experience with identity and access management.
• Working knowledge and experience with full-stack engineering.
• Working knowledge and experience with site reliability engineering.
• Working knowledge and experience with vulnerability and threat management.
• Working knowledge and experience with governance, risk and compliance.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, India.
• The team is globally distributed, and the role works with a globally distributed and remote team.
• This role is level-agnostic, with scope, autonomy, and leadership expectations scaling with level from Senior through Staff.
• The role is not dedicated application security, code review, or compliance-focused work.
• Reactive patch and vulnerability management is not the primary function; the role focuses on getting ahead of threats.