Lead Application Security Engineer

Remote
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

About the Role

This is our first dedicated security hire, and it's a rare chance to define the function from the ground up. You'll own Hightouch's application security posture end-to-end. We have strong engineering fundamentals and a solid foundation; now you'll shape what security looks like here as we scale from 70 to 140+ engineers.

This is a hands-on, high-autonomy role. You'll spend most of your time in the codebase, not in meetings. You’ll be solving hard problems at the intersection of security and distributed systems:

  • Multi-tenant isolation on a system running ~1M data syncs per day and ingesting 100K+ events/sec
  • Sub-tenant access control - for multi-team and multi-brand use cases, requiring differentiated access to configuration and data
  • Security architecture - Build and refine our frameworks for compute isolation and perform threat modeling and hardening of new products
  • Internet-facing APIs - Our high-throughput, internet-facing architecture services customer data at scale. You’ll improve our rate limiting, abuse detection, and granularity of access control
  • Multi-Region and Multi-Cloud - Supporting our multi-region and multi-cloud backend, including extending it to launch Hightouch on in new regions to support data residency requirements of our global customer base

You'll own your roadmap. We're not looking for someone to run a checklist — we're looking for someone who can look at our architecture, identify the highest-leverage problems, and go fix them.

About You

You’ve been an early security hire at a SaaS company before and moved the needle on how they approach security. You can read application code, threat model a distributed system, and ship production fixes. You have significant distributed systems expertise so that you can understand and influence what is being built by the product teams and influence from a place of trust.

Experience that's relevant:

  • Being an early security hire (first 1-3) at a SaaS or data infrastructure company
  • Securing multi-tenant platforms: tenant isolation, authorization models, etc
  • Cloud security on systems that span more than one cloud and operate against customer-owned accounts
  • Design and build of data infrastructure as an early engineer, not just a user. You helped secure it from early design or during major redesigns. You understand how it scales and how it’s secured
  • Privacy-adjacent security (PII handling, data residency, GDPR/CCPA technical controls)

We don't care about certifications. We care about what you've built.

About Hightouch

Hightouch's mission is to empower everyone to take action on their data. Hundreds of companies, including Autotrader, Calendly, Cars.com, Monday.com and PetSmart, rely on Hightouch to drive their growth.

Hightouch created the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). It lets companies use their own data warehouse to collect, prepare and activate customer data for marketing personalization and business operations. Building on that base, Hightouch now offers an Agentic Marketing Platform and AI Decisioning. Marketers set goals and guardrails, and AI agents use them to personalize 1:1 customer interactions. This puts brand context, customer data and performance history in one place, so marketers can build and ship full campaigns themselves. In the past, only technical teams could access and use customer data. Hightouch lets any business user deliver personalized experiences, improve performance marketing and move faster with data and AI.

Culture: The team cares about real impact for customers. People tackle problems from first principles, move quickly and efficiently, and treat each other with compassion and kindness. Hightouch looks for strong communicators with a growth mindset who are motivated and persistent. The engineering culture is strong and holds a very high bar for quality. Software should be scalable, simple and extensible.

Growth: Hightouch is in hypergrowth. Revenue and headcount roughly double every year. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has team members around the world. Backers include Goldman Sachs, Sapphire Ventures, ICONIQ, Bain Capital Ventures, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator and Afore Capital.

Required skills

TypeScript
Go
Cloud: Multi-cloud across AWS, Azure, and GCP

Other roles at Hightouch

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Job details

Salary

$220,000 - $320,000

Location

Remote

Experience

8+ years

Company

NameHightouch
Industryb2b, data, ai, marketing
Team Size579

Funding

Total raised

$322M

Last stage

Series D

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

TM

Tejas Manohar

co-CEO

KG

Kashish Gupta

co-CEO

JC

Josh Curl

CTO

JC

Joshua Curl

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.