Lead Security and Infra Engineer

About Us: Liberate builds AI agents to automate manual tasks for the $2.7T insurance industry. We started with voice — the hardest and most valuable channel in insurance — and are now expanding into full workflow automation across sales, servicing, and claims. Our long-term vision is to build reasoning agents capable of handling the entire spectrum of insurance carrier and broker operations. We've raised $72M to date, including a $50M Series B in October 2025, backed by top-tier venture firms. Location: Boston or Bay Area, hybrid preferred (2x/week in office) Reporting: VP Engineering, dotted line partnership with CPO, and Customer Success leadership Mission Build the secure, reliable infrastructure foundation for Liberate’s agentic platform. You will be a hands-on owner of cloud infrastructure and DevOps while serving as Liberate’s senior technical owner and primary point of contact for product security, cloud security, and compliance. Make the safest path the fastest path so engineers can ship quickly without normal mistakes becoming outages, security incidents, or compliance failures. About the role This is intentionally an infrastructure-heavy security role. You will spend most of your time building and operating production cloud infrastructure, deployment systems, and developer tooling while owning security across the product and platform. This is not a governance-only CISO role or a corporate IT/help desk role. As Liberate’s first dedicated security engineering leader, you will define the function, use vendors where they create leverage, and have the opportunity to build the team as the company scales. What you will do Cloud infrastructure and DevOps • Own and evolve Liberate’s production cloud foundation across AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, networking, compute, storage, data services, environment isolation, and production access. • Build reusable Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration standards, and self-service paths that make environments repeatable and safe. • Improve reliability and operability through observability, alerting, SLOs, capacity and cost management, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and production-readiness standards. • Participate in the engineering on-call model, lead infrastructure incidents when needed, and convert incidents and operational toil into durable platform improvements. • Partner with Platform and product engineering teams on architecture and rollout patterns, reducing manual work and broad privileges through automation and secure defaults. Security engineering and architecture • Serve as Liberate’s senior technical security owner and escalation point, leading threat modeling and secure design reviews for agent capabilities, tool execution, memory, integrations, multi-tenant services, and sensitive data flows. • Build a secure SDLC engineers actually follow, including requirements, code, dependency, container, and infrastructure-as-code scanning, CI gates, security tests, and paved-road defaults. • Own identity, authorization, secrets, key management, encryption, network boundaries, audit trails, production access, and tenant and data-isolation patterns. • Establish practical controls for agentic AI risks, including scoped tool access, credential handling, data exfiltration, prompt injection, model and vendor risk, and traceable actions. • Run vulnerability management end to end, including prioritization, remediation, penetration tests, and third-party reviews. • Build useful security telemetry, detection, playbooks, and tabletop exercises, then lead calm, accountable response and durable follow-through when incidents occur. Compliance and customer trust • Own SOC 2 and related compliance programs end to end: control design, technical implementation, evidence quality, audit readiness, and continuous effectiveness. • Translate compliance requirements into automated technical controls and operational practices rather than manual checklists. • Lead audits, penetration tests, customer security reviews, questionnaires, and technical conversations with enterprise customers, partners, and auditors. • Maintain a clear risk and security roadmap, frame tradeoffs in business terms, and drive concrete mitigations with accountable owners. • Use tools such as Vanta, security vendors, and external specialists as leverage while retaining internal technical ownership. What we are looking for • You are a senior infrastructure, platform, or DevOps engineer with real security depth, or a security engineer who has personally built and operated production cloud infrastructure. • You write code and infrastructure as code, debug production systems, review architecture, and take changes from design through rollout and operation. • You think in systems: identity, authorization, tenant boundaries, failure domains, blast radius, recovery, and the incentives that make secure behavior the default. • You are pragmatic about when to build, buy, automate, delegate, or accept risk, and you right-size controls to the stage of the company. • You lead through influence without becoming a gatekeeper or creating a separate security lane. • You are a calm incident operator and a crisp communicator with engineers, executives, customers, auditors, and vendors, and you are energized by building a function from the ground up. Experience • 8+ years across infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, cloud security, or security engineering. • 4+ years with meaningful ownership of security architecture or security programs for a production SaaS platform. • Deep hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, Terraform or equivalent infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, and production incident response. • Strong working knowledge of IAM, network security, secrets and key management, vulnerability management, secure software delivery, and multi-tenant cloud architecture. • Demonstrated ownership of SOC 2 or a comparable compliance program in a fast-moving environment. • Proficiency in a programming or automation language such as Python, Go, or TypeScript, plus experience in an early-stage or high-growth company where systems had to be built, not inherited. Helpful, not required • Experience securing LLM-based or agentic systems, including tool use, model integrations, prompt injection, or data-leakage risks. • Experience in insurance, financial services, healthcare, or another regulated industry. • Experience designing disaster recovery, multi-account cloud foundations, regional or tenant-isolation strategies, or managing security and incident-response vendors. Success looks like • Production infrastructure is reliable, observable, recoverable, and increasingly defined and enforced through code. • Engineers ship faster through safe, self-service paths rather than ticket queues, one-off access, or manual deployment work. • Broad access, secrets exposure, tenant-boundary risk, and preventable security failures are materially reduced. When issues occur, blast radius is smaller and response is faster. • SOC 2 and customer security work run predictably with strong evidence and minimal fire drills. • Liberate has one trusted technical owner for security, clear expectations embedded in architecture and CI/CD, and a function that can scale with the business. Compensation: Boston; $180,000-$240,000 + equity San Francisco; $190,000 - $250,000 + equity