Principal Security Engineer
Job Summary
As a Principal Security Engineer, you will shape security strategies for Zillow's applications, cloud environments, and AI-enabled systems. You will lead high-impact security assessments, drive AI security initiatives, and mentor engineering teams to embed secure-by-default practices. This role involves broad collaboration across the organization to reduce security risk while supporting fast-paced innovation.
Responsibilities
- Lead security assessments and threat modeling
- Drive AI security initiatives and risk mitigation
- Strengthen AWS cloud-native environment security
- Mentor engineering teams on secure coding
- Develop application security standards
Required Skills
- 7+ years security engineering experience
- AI/LLM security risk assessment
- Cloud security (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Application security expertise
- Programming proficiency
Job Details
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead security assessments for high-impact applications and services, including threat modeling, secure design reviews, and penetration testing.
- Identify, validate, and prioritize complex vulnerabilities across web applications, APIs, and cloud-native services, and partner with engineers to drive secure-by-default outcomes.
- Strengthen the security of primarily AWS-based environments, with additional exposure to GCP and Azure, across areas such as identity, networking, data protection, and service integrations.
- Drive AI security initiatives by establishing guardrails, review practices, and secure design patterns for AI-enabled features and systems.
- Assess AI-specific risks, including data exposure, misuse, model abuse, prompt-based attacks, and unintended system behavior.
- Develop and promote scalable application and AI security standards, best practices, and guardrails across teams.
- Improve application and AI security tooling through configuration, integration, and ongoing optimization in partnership with engineering and platform teams.
- Mentor and influence engineers across teams, raising the technical bar and helping embed security into the way Zillow builds and ships software.
Qualifications:
- 7+ years of security engineering experience, including strong experience in application security and ownership of complex security outcomes.
- Experience driving or owning AI security initiatives and assessing or mitigating risks in AI- or LLM-enabled systems.
- Experience leading advanced security assessments across modern applications, cloud infrastructure, and AI-enabled systems.
- Strong understanding of common vulnerability classes, secure software development practices, and threat modeling.
- Hands-on experience securing cloud-native environments, especially AWS, and designing secure system or cloud architectures.
- Ability to read, write, and review code in at least one modern programming language.
- Excellent communication skills to explain security risks to technical and non-technical partners.
- Experience mentoring engineers and helping raise the technical bar across a team or organization.