Senior Security Engineer - App Sec

About this role

QUICK SUMMARY

You’re the Security Engineer that developers call for advice, and the one who opens the pull request with the fix. Hands-on, cloud-aware, and at home in a codebase.

WHO WE ARE

Kin makes life simpler, more affordable, and better for homeowners — especially in the places where climate risks, rising costs, and outdated systems make it harder. We start with smarter homeowners insurance and expand to everything homeowners need to thrive.

Using data, technology, and thoughtful human support, we’re building products that are clear, fair, and help homeowners feel confident — so homeowners aren’t left behind when they need help most.

Founded in 2016, Kin is a remote-first employer with Kinfolk across more than 35 states. We serve customers in 14 states (and counting). Our disciplined growth, strong customer satisfaction, and focus on long-term sustainability fosters outstanding growth, attracts marquee investors, and earns recognition and accolades, including:

- Built In Chicago's Best Places to Work, Midsize Companies (2021-2026)

- Forbes' America's Best Startup Employers (2026)

- Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies

- Forbes’ Fintech 50 (2023-2026)

- Great Places to Work Certified (May 2024-May 2027)

Most importantly, we’re building Kin to be a place where people do meaningful work with real impact — for our customers, our communities, and each other. We're excited to tell you more about how you can contribute to our rapid growth, strong unit economics, profitability, and excellent customer ratings. To learn more about how we work and what we’re building, visit kin.com http://kin.com and see how we work https://www.linkedin.com/company/kin-insurance/life/kin/.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We’re looking for a Sr Security Engineer with a focus on application security to help us ship fast and ship securely. Security needs to scale with engineering rather than slow it down. In this hands-on role, you’ll advise developers on secure design, review code and architecture before it ships, and get into the code yourself to fix vulnerabilities and collaborate on hardening systems at the source, across both our applications and our cloud infrastructure.

Everything in security is moving fast, and this role calls for someone who stays a step ahead. You’ll track what’s emerging across application, code, and AI security and act on it before it becomes a problem, building the tooling, automation, and relationships that scale your impact. Your work will directly strengthen the security of the platform customers trust with their data.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES

- Own vulnerability remediation across engineering, driving findings to resolution and enforcing remediation SLAs

- Write and ship code to harden Kin systems, working alongside developers to resolve and prevent issues at the source

- Lead secure code reviews and architecture reviews, identifying risks early and delivering actionable recommendations

- Partner with developers on dependency and supply chain security, leading the response and hands-on remediation when critical vulnerabilities emerge in third-party packages

- Build security tooling and automation to scale detection, triage, and remediation

- Identify and collaborate on remediation of cloud vulnerabilities across AWS environments and Terraform-managed infrastructure

- Proactively engage engineering teams and lead threat modeling with to surface security risks early in the development process

- Monitor emerging threats across application, code, and AI security, translating them into proactive remediation and guidance for engineering teams

- Mentor engineers on secure coding practices and drive a security-first mindset across the organization, embedding security into day-to-day development

SUCCESS IN THIS ROLE

In your first 6–12 months at Kin, success is less about checking boxes and more about the impact you create. You’ll use your skills and judgment to take ownership of meaningful work, improve how we operate, and help move Kin’s mission forward. Along the way, you’ll deliver outcomes that make a real difference for both Kinfolk and the homeowners we serve.

By the end of your first year, you should feel confident in your role, trusted as an owner, and proud of the progress you’ve helped make.

- Response and remediation SLAs are being met consistently, supported by observability

- Repetitive security work is increasingly automated, freeing up more of your and engineering’s time to address improvements

- Your relationship with engineering teams is positive and proactive; engineers are engaging you in design and architecture conversations early, instead of after something ships

- Our applications and AWS infrastructure are being proactively hardened, and new work is shipping even more secure by default

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

- 5+ years of experience in software engineering or security engineering, including at least 1 year focused on security and the depth of security expertise to back it up

- Hands-on proficiency in at least one backend programming language, with the ability to write and ship production code fixes (Ruby strongly preferred)

- Hands-on experience working with SAST/DAST tools in CI/CD pipelines and turning their findings into fixes

- Experience driving vulnerability remediation at scale, including dependency and supply chain vulnerabilities, using tools such as GitHub Advanced Security

- Experience performing secure code reviews, architecture reviews, and threat modeling

- Hands-on experience securing AWS environments (IAM, VPCs, WAF) and remediating infrastructure-as-code in Terraform

- Ability to explain security concepts, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

HOW WE HIRE

We believe a great hiring experience should be clear, respectful, and human. We’ll accept applications for this position until 11/30/2026 While our recruiting team uses AI tools for efficiency,…