Senior Application Security Engineer

About this role

At Instructure, we believe in the power of people to grow and succeed throughout their lives. Our goal is to amplify that power by creating intuitive products that simplify learning and personal development, facilitate meaningful relationships, and inspire people to go further in their education and careers.
We do this by giving smart, creative, passionate people opportunities to create awesome. And that's where you come in:

We're growing our security engineering team and building out a dedicated Application Security branch. You'd be joining a team that owns the security of the application code, dependencies, APIs, and development lifecycle behind Canvas, Mastery, and Parchment products used by tens of millions of students, instructors, and institutions.

What we're actually measuring is risk reduction. Not findings filed, not scan coverage, not tickets closed. This shapes the job: a large part of it is forming a defensible view of how much risk something actually carries, driving that risk down, and handing whatever remains to our risk management program so the business can decide about it explicitly. We'd rather you correctly classify ten things and reduce the three that matter than route a thousand alerts.

Our security engineering team is organized into two domain-specialized branches, Application Security and Cloud Infrastructure Security, so that engineers develop genuine depth rather than shallow coverage of everything. You'd own the application domain and get very good at it. We've written down what this role owns and what it doesn't, because we think ambiguity about ownership is one of the main ways security teams become frustrating places to work.

You'll work closely with product engineering teams. Many of the security outcomes we care about are achieved by developers, not by security engineers, so this role is measured substantially by whether you make it easier for developers to build secure software, not by how many findings you file.

CORE ENGINEERING RESPONSIBILITIES

These are the foundation of every engineering role on our security team. You'd own them for the application domain: code, dependencies, APIs, and the SDLC:

Risk classification and residual risk handoff: Determine what risk a finding or design actually represents in context: exposure, data sensitivity, exploitability, blast radius, business impact. Tool-assigned severity is an input, not an answer — a high CVSS score on an unreachable component may be low risk, and a medium score on a public endpoint handling student data may not be.

Severity is our call and so is the framework we level against: Drive that risk down, and where it can't be reduced to an acceptable level, build the case for what remains: what the risk is, what was attempted, what's left, and what resolution would take.

We don't accept risk ourselves, and we don't quietly carry it: see below for who does.

Vulnerability management: triage, severity adjudication, and driving remediation to completion for findings from our scanning tooling. This means partnering with the owning engineering team, not filing a ticket and walking away.

Compensating controls: when a vulnerability can't be directly remediated, design and implement a control that reduces the risk to an accepted level, and document the reasoning and expiry condition.

False-positive adjudication: investigate findings, determine genuine exploitability in context, and suppress non-issues with recorded reasoning. We treat suppression as an engineering judgment that needs a written justification, not a way to clear a queue.

CI/CD security automation: build and maintain the pipeline gates and checks that catch problems before they ship. We'd rather automate a class of issue than review for it forever.

Security tooling: installation, configuration, integration, and data pipelines for the application security toolchain.

APPLICATION SECURITY SPECIALIZATION

Threat modeling: work with product and engineering teams to find design-level problems before they're built.

Secure code review: manual review for the logic and authorization flaws that scanners reliably miss.

SAST/SCA pipeline: own our static analysis and dependency scanning (Snyk, CodeQL, Wiz Code) coverage, signal quality, and developer experience.

Secure defaults and paved-road libraries: build the shared libraries and patterns that make the secure path the easy path.

Developer enablement: training, documentation, office hours, and design consultation.

Product partnership: see below.

Bug bounty program: work with our offensive security engineer to aid in researcher communication and triage flow.

Technical specification review: review application specs against our security review rubric, escalating high-risk and novel designs to our Principal engineer or manager.

PRODUCT PARTNERSHIP

This role has two audiences, and the second one is often missing on security teams.

Development teams are the day-to-day collaboration the people writing the code and shipping the fixes. But product management needs to see the risk carried by their own products in terms they can act on.

Product managers make prioritization calls constantly. They should be making them with visibilityinto security risk rather than discovering it afterward. In practice that means recurring risk reviews with product leadership for your area, risk framing in your specification review feedback, and being the person a product manager can ask "how risky is this, really?" and get a straight, non-alarmist answer.

This is a different skill from developer collaboration: the audience is potentially less technical, the time horizon is longer, and the currency is business impact rather than remediation detail. If translating technical risk for a non-engineering audience is something you enjoy — or want to get good at — this part of the role has real room in it.

MAJOR INCIDENT ESCALATION

We have a SOC that handles the…