Staff / Senior Data Center Security Engineer

Description

The company builds AI systems, and it trains and serves its models on hardware in data centers it operates and in sites that partners build and run for it.

The security engineering team protects those sites, the hardware moving through them, and the people and vendors who handle that hardware.

The team is growing fast and includes researchers, engineers, policy staff and business leaders.

The role is foundational: you will help define how security engineering is built and scaled.

Physical security systems engineers on the team design and test the site security systems themselves. This role builds the controls around them and across the wider areas of hardware custody, media, personnel and vendors.

You will work with the rest of the security engineering team, compute, data center operations, legal, compliance and procurement, and directly with site operators, hardware vendors and logistics providers.

The work centers on controls and the tooling that verifies them. The aim is security that largely runs itself, with requirements kept as code, automated checks, continuously verified evidence and chain of custody, and tools or agents in place of manual reviews. The team prefers simple, standard controls that can be verified over elaborate ones, and uses AI tools throughout its engineering workflow.

Responsibilities

• Own one or more security areas from design through operation: physical security at partner-run and company-run sites, hardware supply chain and chain of custody, media protection and sanitization, personnel security and site access, third-party and vendor assessment, and maintenance and contingency controls.
• Build internal tools, automation and AI agents for evidence collection, access reviews, asset and custody tracking, and partner intake. When a manual process wastes people's time, replace it with a tool.
• Review new sites, leases and vendors for gaps in design, contracts and operator procedures. Write the security terms and exhibits, and confirm the fixes after signing.
• Write requirements and procedures as version-controlled code that partners can build to and assessors can test.
• Assess sites and suppliers against those requirements, on site and from evidence. Record deviations, and design a compensating control where a requirement cannot be met as written.
• Link controls to the compliance frameworks the company and its partners are assessed against, and keep the evidence current so assessments can draw on it directly.
• Respond to security events at sites, such as intrusion alarms, custody breaks and access violations, with operations teams and site operators. Write up what happened and fix the control that failed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree, or an equivalent mix of education, training and experience, in a field relevant to the role, shown through coursework, training or professional work.
• Years of experience required depend on the internal job level for the position.
• Have designed, built or integrated the systems that enforce a security control domain, verified that they work, and owned the domain from start to finish.
• Read and check code, design the data systems behind security tooling, and automate work, often with AI coding agents, using Git and peer review of changes.
• Have done hands-on security work for data centers, critical infrastructure or a large hardware fleet, in at least one of the areas listed under responsibilities.
• Have applied a control framework such as NIST SP 800-53, ISO 27001 or SOC 2 to live systems and produced the evidence for it.
• Draft requirements that outside builders can implement and assessors can check. Each one states what must be true, how that is verified, and which evidence shows it.
• Preferred: experience across several of the areas listed under responsibilities, not just one.
• Preferred: experience at sites you did not fully control, such as cloud, colocation or GPU cloud operators.
• Preferred: experience with federal assessments based on NIST SP 800-53, including NIST SP 800-161 supply chain guidance and NIST SP 800-88 media sanitization guidance, with evidence an assessor has accepted.
• Preferred: experience building GRC or evidence automation, such as automated control checks, asset or custody tracking, questionnaire or assessment pipelines, or docs-as-code workflows.
• Preferred: experience running incident response at physical sites, including alarms, investigations and after-action fixes.
• Preferred: experience working in live data halls and on active construction sites, following a method of procedure.
• Preferred: experience redlining security language in contracts with legal and procurement counterparts.
• Preferred: experience with international sites, covering per-country personnel screening, staffing restrictions, data residency and export controls on hardware.
• Preferred: experience building AI agents or automation that replaced recurring manual security work.

Conditions

Annual base salary range: $320,000 - $405,000 USD.

Regular travel to data center sites, which are critical infrastructure, and possible on-call duty for security events at those sites.

Hybrid policy: staff are expected in an office at least 25% of the time, and some roles require more. Confirm the expectation for this role with the recruiter.

Visa sponsorship is available, but not for every role or every candidate. If an offer is made, the company will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa and keeps an immigration lawyer to help.

Candidates are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every listed qualification.

Benefits

• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• An office space for in-person collaboration with colleagues.