Senior Cloud Security Engineer

Kodiak Robotics, Inc. was founded in 2018 and has become a leader in autonomous ground transportation committed to a safer and more efficient future for all. The company has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) powered technology stack purpose-built for commercial trucking and the public sector. The company delivers freight daily for its customers across the southern United States using its autonomous technology. In 2024, Kodiak became the first known company to publicly announce delivering a driverless semi-truck to a customer. Kodiak is also leveraging its commercial self-driving software to develop, test and deploy autonomous capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense.

We are seeking a highly skilled and proactive Senior Cloud Security Engineer to join our growing security team. In this role, you will be the primary architect and guardian of our central command and control center application environment, ensuring that our cloud-native platforms—and the data within them—remain secure against an evolving threat landscape.

The ideal candidate bridges the gap between traditional security engineering and modern DevOps, possessing a deep understanding of how to secure multi-tenant cloud environments without compromising agility.

In this role, you will:

Scope, design, and build complex security systems end to end, maintaining them through production and driving through ambiguous technical challenges with minimal oversight

Identify systematic risks through threat modeling and risk assessment, then build the controls and infrastructure that address them

Enable other teams to build their own security solutions by providing design pattern guidance and expanding security ownership beyond the security team

Developer security and supply chain

Build and advance our developer security program by embedding security practices into the software development lifecycle and developer workflows

Harden CI/CD pipelines against supply chain attacks through isolated build environments, signed attestations, dependency verification, and automated policy enforcement

Identity and secrets management

Architect systems that protect sensitive assets including model weights, customer data, and training datasets

Build and operate credential issuance, rotation, and workload authentication across our multi-cloud environments

Infrastructure security

Implement and maintain cloud security controls including IAM, network segmentation, VPC architecture, and encryption across our multi-cloud and on-prem environments

Contribute to cluster security controls including RBAC policies, namespace isolation, workload identity, and pod security

Contribute to continuous cloud security posture management using infrastructure-as-code scanning, misconfiguration detection, and automated remediation

Secure frameworks

Build critical security foundations including cryptographic frameworks, mTLS infrastructure, secure serialization, and authorization systems, designed to prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities and empower engineering teams to work securely without becoming security experts themselves

Partner with product, research, infrastructure, and other security teams to ensure frameworks integrate smoothly with lower-layer security controls

What you'll bring:

At least 6 years of software engineering experience with deep security expertise, including leading complex security initiatives independently

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience

Strong programming skills in Python or at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, or C/C++

Deep understanding of identity systems, cryptographic primitives, and secrets management

Working knowledge of Kubernetes security primitives including RBAC, namespaces, network policies, and service accounts

Experience leading cross-functional security initiatives and navigating complex organizational dynamics

Outstanding communication skills, translating technical concepts effectively across all levels of the organization

A track record of bringing clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems and driving them to resolution

Low ego and high empathy, with a history of growing the engineers around you and supporting diverse, inclusive teams

Bonus Points for:

Designed or operated identity and secrets management systems for large-scale AI or cloud infrastructure

Built security frameworks or libraries adopted across an engineering organization

Led a developer security program including supply chain security, secure build infrastructure, and SDLC integrations

Built or secured CI infrastructure using Nix, Bazel, or Kubernetes-based deploy systems, with depth in toolchain issues, CI/CD pipelines, and developer workflow optimization

Implemented machine identity or workload authentication systems using SPIFFE/SPIRE, mTLS, or equivalent

Understanding of Linux systems internals including namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp, and how these underpin container and…