Senior Staff Security Engineer, Security Development

About the team + role

We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. We're looking for bold thinkers. Sharp problem-solvers. Builders who are wired to make an impact. Robinhood isn't a place for complacency, it's where ambitious people do the best work of their careers. We're a high-performing, fast-moving team with ethics at the center of everything we do. Expectations are high, and so are the rewards.

Robinhood's Security Development org is a builder-first security engineering team —  engineers organized across Cloud Security, Infrastructure Security, Security Platform, and Detection & Response. Unlike traditional security teams that identify risk and hand it off, this org builds the systems that solve it. We own the critical authentication and identity infrastructure that protects every Robinhood user, the cryptographic libraries and access provisioning systems that keep internal operations secure, and the telemetry and detection platforms that give our security operations team the signal they need to move fast. If it secures how Robinhood runs — we built it.

AI is reshaping what this team does and how it operates across two dimensions. First, we are embedding security directly into Robinhood's growing AI and agentic infrastructure — building the runtime authentication, credential management, and validation systems that make it possible to run AI safely in production at scale. Second, we are using AI to fundamentally multiply the capability of the security program itself — building intelligent internal platforms that surface vulnerabilities, accelerate detection, and scale our security coverage far beyond what headcount alone could achieve.

As a Senior Staff Software Security Engineer, you will be one of the highest-impact individual contributors in this org. You won't be writing the 10-year vision document — you'll be building the systems that make it real. You'll identify hard, high-leverage problems across the security platform, design and ship solutions end-to-end, and raise the engineering bar for the senior and staff engineers around you. 

This role is based in our Bellevue, WA or Menlo Park, CA office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.

At Robinhood, we believe in the power of in-person work to accelerate progress, spark innovation, and strengthen community. Our office experience is intentional, energizing, and designed to fully support high-performing teams.

What you’ll do

• Identify and own the highest-leverage technical problems across Security Development — from authentication and identity infrastructure to cloud security, cryptography, and AI security — and drive them from concept through production, writing code along the way
• Design and build security systems for Robinhood's AI and agentic infrastructure — including runtime authentication, credential management, and runtime validation systems that allow AI capabilities to operate safely and reliably at scale
• Build intelligent internal security platforms that use AI to multiply the program's effectiveness — including tooling that finds vulnerabilities faster, improves detection fidelity, and scales security coverage across the company
• Partner with engineering managers and senior technical leads across the four Security Development teams to establish priorities, resolve complex technical tradeoffs, and align roadmaps around shared cross-cutting investments
• Stay operationally close to production — your architectural decisions should always be grounded in how systems actually behave at scale, not just how they look on a whiteboard

What you bring

• 12+ years of software or security engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record at the Senior Staff or Principal level — you operate at IC7 scope and you have the output to show for it
• Strong builder orientation — you have designed, built, operated, and maintained production security systems end-to-end; you don't hand designs to other teams to implement
• Deep expertise in one or more of: Identity & Access Management (IAM), authentication systems, cryptography, cloud security (AWS), or infrastructure security — with genuine breadth across adjacent security domains
• Hands-on experience securing AI infrastructure, LLM integrations, agentic systems, or AI-adjacent authentication and credential management challenges — this is a priority area for the team and a strong differentiator
• Proficiency in Go and/or Python applied to building backend security platforms, internal tooling, or security infrastructure — not just scripting or automation
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals and comfort operating in a complex, multi-team production environment — you understand how large-scale systems fail and how to build security into them without slowing them down
• The ability to identify unstructured, high-impact technical problems independently and build a path to solving them without waiting for top-down direction — you don't need a roadmap handed to you

What we offer

• Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career.
• Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, equity ownership, and 401(k) matching.
• Top Tier benefits to fuel your work, including 100% paid health insurance for employees with 90% coverage for dependents.
• Access to the Robinhood Employee Fund that gives eligible US employees the opportunity to invest in a private employee fund that provides exposure to Robinhood Ventures funds.
• Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not. 
• Lifestyle wallet - a highly flexible benefits spending account for wellness, learning, and more.
• Employer-paid life & disability insurance, fertility benefits, and mental health benefits.
• Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, parental leave, and more!
• Exceptional office experience with catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces.