Senior / Staff Security Engineer

At Linear, we're building the product development system for teams and agents. AI is fundamentally changing how software gets built, and we're shaping the tools this new era requires.

Founded in 2019, Linear has become the platform of choice for more than 30,000 companies (including OpenAI, Coinbase, and Ramp) to plan, build, and ship their products. Today, our team is distributed across North America, Europe, and Australia, and we're continuing to grow internationally. What unites us is relentless focus, fast execution, and a deep care for software craftsmanship.

At Linear, we are committed to quality. Security is an essential part of that quality - not a layer that we add later, but something we build in from the start. We have a foundational security program we're proud of but, as Linear evolves our product and scales into enterprise, there's meaningful work ahead: staying ahead of vulnerabilities as our attack surface grows, responding fast and cleanly when incidents happen, and hardening our product and infrastructure. As Security Engineer at Linear, you'll be operating in a high-autonomy role with real scope, doing hands on security work across the product and infrastructure we build.

Linear is a remote-first company. This role is open to candidates based in North America. You can work from anywhere within this region. We value deep focus and async collaboration, with intentional moments to connect in person through team off-sites, optional co working, and occasional travel.

What you'll do

Operate, automate, and extend vulnerability management end to end: triage, prioritize, and drive remediation across product, infrastructure, and dependencies, and keep the program's SLAs meaningful rather than theoretical

Run our bug bounty program: triage incoming reports, validate severity, work with engineering on fixes, and keep researcher relationships professional and responsive

Lead product security testing: threat model new features (including AI/agent-facing surfaces), review designs and code for security relevant risk, and do hands on testing (manual and tool assisted) rather than relying solely on scanners

Be a primary responder for security incidents: lead investigation and containment, drive postmortems, and turn lessons into concrete hardening work

Own meaningful chunks of our cloud/infra security posture on GCP/k8s/Postgres: harden configurations, close gaps surfaced by audits or scanning, and partner with infra engineering on secure defaults

Build and maintain security tooling and automation, including using AI/LLM tooling to speed up triage, code review and repetitive investigation work, so the program scales without linear headcount growth

Partner with the GRC/Trust function: feed real findings into the risk register and control evidence, and help make sure compliance requirements reflect actual engineering practice

What we're looking for

A generalist, senior level security engineer (5+ years across security engineering, with real depth in at least two of: vulnerability management, product/appsec testing, incident response, and cloud security). We need breadth, rather than a narrow specialist in any one of these.

Hands on and technical: you can read and reason about code (we use a lot of TypeScript), you're comfortable in cloud environments (GCP a plus), and you can go deep on a finding rather than just filing a ticket for someone else to fix. You're comfortable using AI coding/security tools as force multipliers (Linear Agent, Claude, Codex, etc).

Calm under pressure: you can lead an incident from first alert through postmortem without needing to be told what to do next

A builder: you'd rather write a script or ship a tool than repeat a manual process a third time

A pragmatic risk reducer: you optimize for actually reducing risk, not for checking a box or maximizing findings count

Autonomy oriented: comfortable setting your own priorities, working with significant independence, and knowing when to

A clear communicator: able to explain a technical finding to a non technical stakeholder and write it up so it's actually actionable

Our tech

This is a hands on security engineering role. You'll be running tools, reading/writing code, building detections, working in our cloud environment, and partnering closely with the engineers who build our product. Our stack is fronted by Cloudflare and runs on Google Cloud with k8s, Postgres, and Node.

For day to day work, we use:

Linear, GitHub, Slack, and Google Workspace for collaboration

Claude and ChatGPT for general & engineering specific AI tasks

Vanta for compliance automation and evidence collection

Our security specific tooling includes:

GitHub Advanced Security

SentinelOne

What we offer

We're a small, focused team that cares deeply about the quality of our work and the people we do it with. Here's what you can expect:

Competitive salary and equity

Employee friendly equity terms including early exercise in the US and extended exercise windows

Daily meal and coffee stipend on every workday

Health coverage (based on country requirements)

5 weeks paid vacation, plus local statutory holidays

4 months paid parental leave

Paid month off after 4 years & every 2 years thereafter

Linear is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law.