Senior Security Engineer at Axios

The big picture: Axios is a respected media company dedicated to providing trustworthy, award-winning news content in an audience-first format known as Smart Brevity™. We are looking for a Senior Security Engineer with strong cloud infrastructure and AI security experience to lead our defensive posture, drive threat modeling and vulnerability management, and embed security controls - including AI-driven defense and monitoring - across our platform and automation pipelines.

Why it matters: As a Senior Security Engineer at Axios, you will architect and implement proactive security strategies to protect our audience, platform, and data assets against evolving threat vectors, including AI-driven attacks. In this role, you will define our security roadmap, leverage internal and third-party AI defense tools, and ensure our cloud systems remain resilient, secure by default, and capable of automated threat detection and response.

Responsibilities

Lead the architectural design and implementation of security controls across cloud infrastructure, platform services, and AI integrations.
Drive vulnerability management, threat modeling, incident response, and proactive security assessments across AWS, Kubernetes, and AI application environments.
Shape, maintain, and execute the company’s long-term security roadmap in close alignment with engineering and executive leadership.
Embed automated security testing, SAST/DAST, and AI-driven compliance checks directly into CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code workflows.
Oversee identity and access management (IAM), secrets management, encryption protocols, and zero-trust architecture standards.
Evaluate, deploy, and maintain internal AI security tools and modern third-party defensive solutions to detect, mitigate, and respond to AI-driven threats and sophisticated attack vectors in real time.
Promote a strong security culture across engineering by conducting threat modeling workshops and coaching teams on secure coding and infrastructure practices.
Partner with product, infrastructure, data, and QE teams to ensure security is integrated seamlessly into every stage of the development lifecycle.

Skills

Deep expertise in cloud and application security, including threat modeling, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, IAM, secrets management, AI security, and compliance frameworks.
Strong working knowledge of AWS infrastructure and security controls (IAM, KMS, EKS, RDS, S3).
Experience hardening Kubernetes clusters, runtime security, container scanning, and network policy enforcement.
Proficiency in integrating SAST/DAST and security automation into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions).
Solid scripting or programming skills in Python, Go, or Bash for security tooling and automated remediation.
Hands-on experience with SIEM, security logging, automated threat intelligence, and AI-powered monitoring frameworks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or modern SOC tooling).
Demonstrated leadership in driving security initiatives, defining policy, and guiding engineering teams on security risk.
Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to effectively balance security requirements and business agility.

What success looks like

Security & Compliance: Focused on proactive security initiatives, including automated vulnerability scans, implementation of controls, remediation, and contributions to the long-term security roadmap.
Cloud Security Architecture: Hardened, reviewed, and optimized AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure security to meet strict compliance, resilience, and least-privilege access standards.
DevSecOps & Automation: Integrated automated security scans, secret detection, and vulnerability gates seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines without disrupting developer velocity.
Security Tooling Adoption: Evaluated, piloted, and deployed advanced security and defensive AI tools that measurably enhanced threat detection speed and reduced exposure risk.
Threat Detection & Response: Established robust security monitoring, SIEM alerting, and incident response playbooks to maintain real-time visibility and rapid response capabilities across all production platforms.