Principal Security Engineer, Product & Platform

Gradial is the marketing operations system of work that helps marketers and creatives move from idea to execution faster. Our platform orchestrates across martech stacks, workflows, and people to automate marketing execution, cutting execution time, so marketers focus on the work only humans can do: shaping brands, understanding customers, and creating the work that moves people. Backed by leading investors, we’re building software that adapts to the user, not the other way around. We move with urgency, operate with ownership, and solve hard problems from first principles. If you want to do ambitious work, take real responsibility, and help define the future of AI-native content operations, you’ll do your best work here. The Role Gradial builds agentic workflow products that operate across complex enterprise environments for Fortune 500 companies. As our first dedicated security engineer, you’ll own product and platform security end to end, shaping how we design, build and operate secure agentic systems at scale. This is a deeply hands-on Principal IC role where you’ll set the technical direction for security, build the systems and controls that matter most and partner closely with engineering as our platform and customer base grow. You’ll work alongside our IT and compliance lead, who owns GRC and corporate IT, and have significant autonomy to determine where security investment will have the greatest impact. What You’ll Own • Define and drive Gradial’s product and platform security strategy, prioritizing investments against the risks that matter most as we scale. • Lead threat modeling for our agentic platform and design protections across agent behavior, permissions, isolation, customer data and platform boundaries. • Harden our application and cloud infrastructure across production access, IAM, secrets management and the CI/CD supply chain. • Partner with engineering to build secure-by-default patterns into how agents, services and infrastructure are designed and shipped. • Own security detection and incident response for the platform, including logging standards, detection coverage and response processes. • Represent technical security in enterprise customer reviews and architecture discussions, translating our approach clearly to customer security teams. • Own the technical controls that support SOC 2 in partnership with our IT and compliance lead, ensuring controls are effective in practice as our systems evolve. • Help shape the future of security at Gradial, including identifying where we need additional capabilities and helping hire future security team members. What We Need • 10+ years of experience in security engineering, including Principal or Staff-level ownership across complex production systems. • Deep product security experience across threat modeling, secure architecture, authentication and authorization and multi-tenant systems. • Strong hands-on experience with cloud security, Kubernetes, IAM and infrastructure as code. • A strong technical point of view on securing LLM and agent-based systems, with the ability to reason about emerging risks from first principles. • Experience leading security incident response for production services and improving systems based on what you learn. • A track record of writing and shipping production code, security tooling or infrastructure, not just reviewing the work of others. • Strong judgment and comfort making pragmatic security tradeoffs in fast-moving environments without an established playbook. • Clear communication with engineers, company leadership and enterprise customer security teams. Nice to Have • Experience as an early security hire at a high-growth B2B SaaS, AI or infrastructure company. • Experience building security detections, telemetry and logging pipelines in cloud environments. • Experience implementing technical controls for SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or contributing to AI security research, standards or open-source security tooling. The salary range for this position is $180,000 – $240,000 annually. Final compensation will be determined based on factors such as experience, skills, and qualifications. What we offer • Performance-based annual bonus • Meaningful equity awards • Medical, dental & vision (fully covered for employees with 75% for dependents) • Fertility & family-planning support • 401k plan • Unlimited PTO • A beautiful Seattle office with a gym, sauna, and bike parking • Free lunch three days a week in our HQ • A front-row seat to building category-defining AI infrastructure You'll thrive here if you • Learn quickly, actively seek out new challenges, and regularly reconsider “how it’s always been done.” • Want to have real impact with zero bureaucracy. • Have an innate drive for being 1% better than the day before, building towards greatness. • Embrace AI as a core tool for problem-solving, innovation, and scale. • Show customer-obsession (internal or external), high ownership/accountability, and bias for action. • Communicate clearly, directly, with curiosity, and assuming good intentions. • Thrive in fast-paced, hyper-growth environments where building better > maintaining status quo. AI Literacy & Interviewing Tools As an AI-first company, we prioritize AI literacy as a core competency in our hiring decisions. We’re excited by candidates who thoughtfully apply AI tools in their work, but during interviews we’re focused on you. This is your opportunity to show how you think, communicate, and solve problems. Over-reliance on AI-generated responses during the interview process (especially when it obscures your own voice) will result in disqualification. We want to understand your unique perspective and how you approach challenges, both with and without AI. Gradial is dedicated to creating an environment where diverse perspectives are valued and all team members can grow. We offer competitive compensation, equity, flexible work hours, comprehensive benefits, and a collaborative culture focused on learning and impact.