Staff Application Security Engineer at Upside

About this role

Meet Upside:
We created Upside to transform brick-and-mortar commerce. Our technology uses the sophistication of online retail—profit measurement, attribution, and incrementality—to provide users with more value on their everyday purchases and brick-and-mortar businesses with new, profitable customers. We’ve helped millions of users earn 2 to 3 times more cashback than any other product, and hundreds of thousands of brick-and-mortar businesses earn measurable profit. Billions of dollars in commerce run through the Upside platform every year, and that value goes directly back to our retailer partners, the consumers they serve, and important sustainability initiatives.

The Impact You'll Make
You'll report to the Product Security Manager and work closely with our Cloud Security and Engineering teams to scale secure software delivery across Upside. This role owns our application security program, reducing real risk across mobile, web, and cloud systems by driving remediation, building engineering guardrards, and creating security guidance that developers actually use.
You'll also work both sides of the AI problem: we use AI to do security work, and we secure the AI systems we're building. If you came into security from a product engineering background, we'd especially love to hear from you.


Own Upside's application security program, the standards, the vulnerability management pipeline, and the guardrails that stop entire classes of defects from coming back


Drive vulnerability management outcomes by triaging and tuning findings from scanning, code review, and our annual penetration test, then partnering with engineering teams to get fixes shipped and verified


Lead application security reviews and threat models for high-impact work across mobile, web, and backend systems, and document risk decisions with clear mitigation plans


Review and threat model agentic AI workflows, and define security controls for tool use, data access, and action execution


Build and improve the automation that triages findings, prioritizes them with service context, and produces remediation guidance engineers can act on


Build guardrails that scale beyond our team; repository baselines, required checks in GitHub, secure-by-default patterns for AWS workloads, reusable templates, and a security champions program


What You'll Bring


6+ years in application or product security or equivalent depth in secure software engineering with meaningful application security ownership


Strong Python code review skills, you can open a Lambda, understand what it does, and explain to the engineer who wrote it exactly what's wrong and why


A track record of shipping security improvements that reduced real risk, not just running scanners or writing policy, you can point to fixes that landed, were verified, and to remediation you drove across teams you didn't own


Experience with threat modeling and secure design review, engaging with designs before they ship, not only with code after the fact


Practical, everyday use of AI in your security work; this is about how you already work, not a tool you've tried once


Working knowledge of our stack: AWS security (Lambda, API Gateway, IAM least privilege, secrets handling) and CI/CD security in GitHub Actions, depth in the underlying mechanics matters more here than years in any one platform


Tools We Use


GitHub: Actions, Advanced Security, Copilot


Python, Terraform


AWS: Lambda, API Gateway, IAM, DynamoDB, S3, SNS, SQS, VPCs


Snowflake, SQL, dbt, Dagster


Claude, Claude Code, Amazon Bedrock


Benefits:


Medical, dental, and vision coverage starting on Day 1


Equity (ISOs)


401(k) program


Family planning programs + paid parental leave


Physical fitness and wellness memberships


Emotional and mental health support programs


Unlimited PTO + 10 paid federal holidays + our annual, week-long Winter Break


Flexible work environment


Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees


Employee Resource Groups


Learning and Development stipend


Transparent culture


Amazing mission!


Diversity and Inclusion:
Diversity drives innovation, and our differences make us stronger. We‘re passionate about building a workplace that represents a variety of backgrounds, skills, and perspectives, and we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Everyone is welcome here!

If there's anything we can do to support a disability or special need during your application or interview process, please email accommodations@upside.com.
This email is for accessibility accommodations only, it should not be used to submit job applications.

Notice To Recruiters And Placement Agencies:
This is an in-house search with a dedicated recruiter. Please do not submit resumes to any person or email address at Upside. Upside is not liable for, and will not pay, placement fees for candidates submitted by any party or agency other than its approved recruitment partners.