Security Operations Engineer

Who We Are:

We deploy powerful AI agents in complex, regulated industries, specializing in building the systems that enable autonomous agents to operate entire functions securely and reliably. Our belief is that people should be free of administrative and operational drudgery so they can create value through creativity, reasoning, and judgement.

We're starting in higher education, a sector with ~$700B in expenses defined by heavy workflows across departments, such as admissions, financial aid, facilities, advising, student services, advancement, and more. Our agents are already embedded across these departments, interacting with millions of students and staff. They process applications, package aid, resolve verification issues, run large-scale communication workflows, handle student support tickets, and more.

We believe that universities are among the most consequential institutions in the world, sitting at the foundation of social and economic progress. Improving how they operate improves who gets educated, who gets supported, and who gets a chance. When higher education runs better, everything built on top of it does too.

About the Role:

We're hiring a Security Operations Engineer to own the technical controls, security-critical IT surface, and operationalized compliance program that protect CollegeVine and our customers' data. This is a hands-on, build-and-own generalist role split roughly evenly three ways — security technical controls, IT operations, and security program/compliance — with the mix flexing to whatever's on fire. You'll operate from goals, not a playbook: given "get us audit-ready with less manual effort," you build the plan. Nobody hands you the steps.

Responsibilities

Security technical controls

• Own the day-to-day operation of our centralized logging/SIEM — investigate alerts, create and tune detections, improve signal quality, and build the runbooks to act on them.

• Drive vulnerability management end to end — scanning, triage, and remediation to closure across our stack.

• Harden our cloud environment and CI/CD pipelines, establish security configuration baselines and guardrails, and manage them through Infrastructure as Code.

• Partner with engineering teams to review new systems and architectural changes, identifying security risks early and helping build secure solutions by default.

• Own secrets management, endpoint/EDR, and data-protection controls.

IT operations

• Own the security-critical IT surface — partnering with our existing IT function, not depending on it day-to-day.

• Manage endpoint hardening.

• Harden our core SaaS/business apps — identity provider, Google Workspace, GitHub, and the rest.

Security program & compliance, operationalized

• Own and continuously improve our security compliance platform (Vanta) — automate evidence collection, strengthen integrations, and improve its operational value.

• Build toward compliance obligations as the business requires; turn policy into enforced reality by implementing the technical controls behind it, co-maintained with GRC + Legal.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years of hands-on work with security technical controls, ideally alongside strength in IT operations and/or security compliance

• Experience operating technical controls across their full lifecycle(built, tuned, maintained, retired), not just stood up once.

• Hands-on experience running a SIEM as a living system — investigating alerts, tuning detections, reducing noise, and closing visibility gaps over time.

• Experience with real audits (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, or equivalent) and the judgment to tell a control that produces evidence from one that just looks good.

• Practical IAM and SaaS/cloud administration experience (identity security, least privilege, access reviews).

• Scripting and automation ability (Python, Bash, or similar) — and a track record of maintaining what you build.

• A calm, process-driven, and people first approach when something's on fire; and a habit of writing things down so they outlive you.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with a compiled language (Go, Rust) for heavier automation.

• Relevant certifications (e.g., CISSP, Security+, cloud security certs) — useful signal, never a substitute for hands-on ability.

• Hands-on AWS security and Infrastructure as Code experience, especially Terraform.

• Experience as an early or first security hire at a startup.

Location: Remote

CollegeVine partners with 200+ universities, deploying agentic AI to power campus operations. We have raised venture funding from dedicated investors such as Menlo Ventures (Anthropic, Carta), Silversmith Capital Partners (Webflow, Formstack), Morningside Technology Ventures (Xiaomi, TikTok), and more. In 2020, after years of being a remote-friendly company, CollegeVine became a fully remote company (with a NYC office) with a diverse cast of team members based predominantly in the United States, but also around the world.