Head of security
About this role
About us:
Airtm is a financial-infrastructure company building the future of the online-work economy. We are on a mission to empower the world's growing number of Digital Entrepreneurs in the Global South, giving them the financial freedom to thrive.
The problem is clear: in emerging markets, accessing the dollar economy is difficult. Cross-border payments are slow, expensive, and often lose value to inflation. This limits the potential of millions of talented individuals.
Airtm’s solution is a swift and comprehensive financial platform that facilitates low-value cross-border payments and local cash-outs. As pioneers in stablecoin-payment infrastructure, Airtm has built the most advanced cross-border payment system available on the market.
As a company married to the world of online work, Airtm will go beyond payments to build the necessary infrastructure the online-work economy needs to thrive. We are fostering an entirely new economy, giving individuals, communities, and countries the tools to take control of their financial destinies.
About the Role
We're looking for a Head of Security to build and lead security at Airtm, reporting to the VP of Engineering. You'll own the security posture of the systems that move people's money across borders, from application code and cloud infrastructure to identity, vendors, and incident response. You'll set the strategy, build the team and the practices around it, and stay hands-on enough to make the hard technical calls yourself.
Our stack is TypeScript/Node.js microservices on Kubernetes (AWS), with React front ends, organized into autonomous product teams. Security here works as an enabler embedded in how teams ship, not a gate at the end. AI-assisted development is core to how we build, so you'll be expected to use AI tooling fluently for security work, and to define how we adopt AI agents and LLM-powered systems safely.
Key Responsibilities
Security Strategy & Roadmap: Define and own a risk-based security strategy for a financial platform; prioritize investment by real threat and business impact, and report on posture to executive leadership and the board
Incident Response: Own detection, response, and recovery for security incidents; maintain runbooks, lead incidents and post-incident reviews, coordinate with forensics, legal, and communications, and turn every incident into lasting improvements
Application Security: Embed security into the SDLC with threat modeling, secure design reviews, SAST/DAST/dependency scanning, and secure coding standards that engineers actually adopt
Cloud & Infrastructure Security: Partner with Infrastructure to harden AWS, Kubernetes, networking, and CI/CD pipelines; own IAM and least-privilege access, secrets management, and security in Terraform and GitOps workflows
Detection & Monitoring: Build the detection and alerting capability that finds malicious activity early, across application, infrastructure, and access logs, and tune it to keep signal high
Crypto & Key Security: Own the security model for key management, wallet and custody operations, and the blockchain integrations our payment rails depend on
Fraud & Account Security Collaboration: Work with Product and Risk teams on account takeover, abuse, and transaction-level controls
AI Security: Define guardrails for AI coding tools and for AI agents and LLM pipelines we build or deploy, including agent permissions, prompt injection, data exposure, and tool-access boundaries
Compliance & Assurance: Own our security compliance program (SOC 2 and related frameworks), audits, and customer and partner security questionnaires, aiming to make compliance a byproduct of good engineering rather than a separate burden
Vendor & Third-Party Risk: Run vendor risk assessments and security due diligence for partners, investors, and acquirers
Vulnerability & Patch Management: Establish clear SLAs by severity and keep remediation moving across teams without becoming a bottleneck
Team Building & Mentorship: Hire, grow, and lead security engineers; build a security champions network inside product teams; raise the security bar across all of engineering
On-Call & Escalation: Participate in and help shape the security escalation path for production incidents
Required Qualifications
8+ years of experience in information or application security, including 3+ years leading security teams or functions
Demonstrated experience leading incident response for real, high-stakes incidents, including coordination with external forensics and counsel
Strong knowledge of AWS security and Kubernetes security (IAM, network segmentation, RBAC, secrets management, container and image security)
Hands-on experience with application security in a microservices environment: threat modeling, secure code review, and dependency and supply-chain risk
Experience building detection and monitoring capabilities (SIEM, log analysis, alerting; Datadog or similar)
Experience owning or leading a compliance program such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or PCI-DSS, including audit cycles
Ability to read and review TypeScript/Node.js code and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform); you don't need to be a full-time developer, but you need to be credible with engineers
Experience securing CI/CD pipelines and software supply chains
Hands-on experience with AI-assisted tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) for security work, and a clear point of view on the risks of AI-generated code and agentic systems
Strong communication skills; able to explain risk to engineers, executives, regulators, and customers, and to write policies and runbooks people follow
Sound judgment under pressure; able to make fast, defensible calls with incomplete information
Nice to Have
Background in fintech, payments, remittance, or crypto environments, especially key management, custody, and blockchain security
Experience with fraud, account takeover, and abuse prevention
Experience securing AI agents and LLM-powered systems in production (prompt injection defenses, tool-permission models, eval and red-teaming approaches)
Hands-on offensive security experience (penetration testing, red teaming) or running bug bounty programs
Experience with cloud-native security tooling (CSPM, runtime protection, policy-as-code such as OPA/Kyverno)
Familiarity with regulatory requirements for money transmission and financial services across multiple jurisdictions
Security certifications (CISSP, CISM, OSCP, AWS Security Specialty)
Experience supporting investor, buyer, or enterprise due diligence on security posture
Experience building a security function from a small base in a fast-growing engineering org
What We Look For
Beyond the technical skills, we're looking for a leader who:
Takes ownership of security outcomes, stays calm and clear in an incident, and communicates early when risk is rising
Treats security as a partnership with engineers, building guardrails and paved roads rather than gates and tickets
Has good judgment about risk, knowing when to stop a release, when a small risk is worth the speed, and how to explain the tradeoff to the business
Improves the team around them, through mentorship, champions, and making secure choices the easy ones
Collaborates across boundaries, working with Product, Infrastructure, Legal, Compliance, and Support as one team
Knows when (and when not) to lean on AI tooling, and brings rigor to how we adopt it safely
Originally posted on Himalayas
