At River AI, our mission is to create personal AI owned and shaped by each individual. To achieve this, we are rewriting the entire stack from scratch: personal hardware for local inference, bespoke training infrastructure, next-generation UIs, and frontier deep learning research.
Who we are
We are scientists, engineers, and builders from the industry's top tech companies and AI labs. We bring a proven track record of scaling consumer systems for hundreds of millions of users and architecting the pre-training infrastructure behind today's frontier models.
About the Role
We are seeking a deeply technical, operationally rigorous Security lead to build and lead security from the ground up. As our first security hire, you will define how we protect our research infrastructure, model weights, corporate assets, and customer-facing platform—without slowing the pace of frontier AI development.
This role calls for a blend of hands-on engineering leadership, program development, and strategic vision. You will be expected to stand up world-class capabilities across cybersecurity, detection and response, product security, and operational security, while treating security as an enabler of development rather than a bottleneck.
What You’ll Do
- Build the security function from first principles. Architect and scale our end-to-end security operation—encompassing product and infrastructure security, detection engineering, incident response, GRC, and workplace security.
- Protect the crown jewels. Secure our most critical assets: proprietary model weights, training data pipelines, research clusters, and source code against sophisticated adversaries actively targeting AI intellectual property.
- Move at the speed of research. Design lightweight, automated security controls and secure-by-default infrastructure that empower developers to experiment safely, avoiding bureaucratic workflows..
- Integrate security, IT, and privacy engineering. Own corporate IT, identity and access management, and privacy engineering to ensure a seamless, secure employee experience.
- Drive security research and tooling. Explore how AI capabilities can transform vulnerability discovery, code analysis, and defensive operations. Explore how products can be better secured.
- Own the trust narrative. Serve as the external face of security to enterprise customers, regulators, board members, and government partners; lead the compliance roadmap (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, etc.) to unblock commercial and public-sector adoption.
- Build an elite team. Recruit and mentor high-performing security engineers, operators, and researchers who automate repetitive work, embed security into the SDLC, and raise the bar for the entire industry.
Skills & Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- 10+ years in security with significant experience with a technology company, AI preferred.
- Proven track record as a first or early security executive in a high-velocity, high-stakes environment; comfortable setting strategy while remaining close to tooling, architecture, and incident command.
- Deep expertise in two or more of: detection engineering, incident response, digital forensics, infrastructure security, product/application security, operational security, or secure software development.
- Direct experience securing cloud-native, large-scale distributed systems, container/VM environments, and high-performance compute clusters.
- Demonstrated ability to build and ship security tooling or research projects—whether internal platforms, open-source tools, or commercial security products.
- Strong cross-functional presence: you can translate technical risk for executes, partner with research leads on novel threat models, and review code or architecture.
- Intellectually curious about AI safety, alignment, and the unique security challenges of AI model and AI agent development.
Preferred Qualifications: (We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all of these)
- Experience with model-weight protection, secure multi-party compute, confidential computing, or supply-chain security at an AI lab or research organization.
- Published research, conference talks, or open-source contributions in security engineering or defensive operations.
- Experience with startups or venture-backed companies.
Logistics & Benefits
- Location: Palo Alto, California.
- Compensation: Depending on experience and skills the expected base pay is $200,000 - $420,000 USD per year, plus equity.
- Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance; unlimited PTO; and relocation assistance as needed.
- Visa Sponsorship: We sponsor visas and are committed to supporting the process for the right candidate.
