Founding Platform & Security Engineer

Founding Platform & Security Engineer

At Gradient Labs, we’re on a mission to make exceptional customer service the norm.

Founded in 2023, we’ve quickly gone from an idea to a growing team with customers you know (and probably love). Our AI agent helps businesses handle even the trickiest, high-stakes customer support queries safely and effectively, all while giving them the visibility and control they need to trust the outcomes.

We’re a small but mighty team of builders from leading companies like Monzo, Pleo, and Google.

If you’re excited to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and help shape the future of customer operations, we’d love to hear from you.

🎯 How you’ll make an impact

We're looking for our Founding Platform & Security Engineer – a highly skilled and passionate individual to join our growing team. In this critical, greenfield role, you'll have significant ownership in shaping and securing our cutting-edge AI agent platform and underlying infrastructure from the ground up.

Reporting directly to the CTO, you'll lead the technical vision for Platform & Security, collaborating closely with AI, engineering and product teams to embed robust security practices throughout our development lifecycle. This is an exciting opportunity to apply deep security expertise, particularly in the realm of AI, and build enterprise-grade security systems in a rapidly evolving environment.

• Lead platform security: Take complete ownership of application, cloud, network, and AI agent security across our platform, performing secure design reviews, overseeing threat modelling, and building new security primitives directly into our product and infrastructure.

• Architect & implement secure & effective platform tooling: Design and implement a comprehensive security framework covering customer-facing products, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and enterprise integration points, ensuring protection against modern, AI-enabled threats.

• Embed security in AI: Partner with our AI engineer teams to integrate security best practices into model evaluation and deployment processes, empowering our teams to innovate safely and responsibly.

• Automate & tool: Streamline security operations by integrating tooling into CI/CD pipelines, leveraging AI-based or next-gen solutions to automate scans, compliance checks, and infrastructure reviews.

• Continuously improve security posture: Conduct regular audits of our cloud environment, perform penetration testing, and stay ahead of emerging AI security risks, recommending strategic security initiatives and leading efforts to establish best practices as the company scales.

• Enable enterprise customer needs: Present and explain our security posture to enterprise clients, helping them understand how we secure their data, and addressing concerns around healthcare, financial, or other regulated data with clear, actionable insights and support compliance requirements.

• Incident response: Lead security incidents response, ensuring rapid resolution while maintaining service availability and minimising impact.

• Mentor & educate: Mentor other engineers and contribute to establishing a strong security-first culture across the broader engineering organisation.

💡 What you’ll bring

• 5+ years of industry experience in security engineering, with a strong foundation in web application security, cloud security (AWS, or GCP), and networking principles.

• Hands-on experience with programming production software (e.g., Python, Go), scripting, and DevOps tools for automation.

• Familiar with secure coding practices, threat modelling, vulnerability scanning, and incident response processes.

• Strong knowledge of cloud security architecture, including VPC security, and enterprise-grade deployment patterns.

• Proven track record building or integrating security systems that meet enterprise expectations (e.g., SIEM, Vulnerability Management, compliance platforms).

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment, adaptable to changing priorities, and able to handle ambiguity with grace.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, able to clearly explain risk trade-offs and convey complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership and customers.

• Customer-first mindset and a passion for deeply understanding customer needs to find the right security solutions from first principles.