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Salary: USD 100,000 - 258,000 / annual
xAI (SpaceXSI) is building Super Intelligence infrastructure and products, including the Grok models and applications. This Security Engineer role focuses on securing the Kubernetes platform that runs X and SpaceXSI's infrastructure, products, and workloads.
You will work on end-to-end platform security across nodes, clusters, pods, roles, tokens, secrets, service-to-service communication, and supply chain. The role emphasizes practical security controls and tooling over documentation, with a focus on least privilege and defense-in-depth at fleet scale.
Key responsibilities include:
- Securing the platform end-to-end: nodes, clusters, pods, RBAC, secrets, and supply chain
- Finding and remediating overprivileged permissions, dangerous pod settings, and escalation paths
- Assessing the platform from an adversary perspective (container breakout, privilege escalation, lateral movement) using safe, constrained validation
- Designing and building security tooling and automation, including AI-assisted analysis, to catch risky configurations before or after deployment
- Strengthening identity and secrets handling for least-privilege workload access
- Improving supply-chain security through secure base images and continuous scanning
- Reviewing changes affecting RBAC, operators, ServiceAccounts, network policies, and elevated-privilege workloads
- Partnering with platform and product teams as a security owner from identification through rollout
- Contributing to fleet-wide hardening, policy enforcement, and safer defaults
The company values understanding how Kubernetes can be abused (not just configured), shipping practical controls over policy documents, and providing clear findings that platform teams can act on.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- 3+ years in platform security, Kubernetes security, or offensive security against production infrastructure
- Deep knowledge of pod and workload security: privileged containers, capabilities, host namespaces, host path mounts, service accounts, RBAC, admission control, and network isolation
- Working knowledge of identity, secrets, workload identity, service-to-service trust, supply chain, runtime, and cloud access
- Ability to think like an attacker, measure blast radius, and convert attack paths into detections, controls, or tools
- Comfortable with operators, custom resources, Helm, and GitOps workflows
- Ability to build or modify security tooling in Go, Python, or Rust
- Bonus: Image scanning, SBOMs, secure base images, policy-as-code (Kyverno, OPA), multi-cluster environments, runtime detection, and security testing of customer-facing applications
PREFERRED:
- Experience developing AI-driven security tools or integrating AI into security workflows
- Familiarity with Kubernetes-based environments and cloud-native infrastructure security
- Proven ability to drive technical decisions and influence security practices across teams
- Passion for challenging the status quo and building transformative security solutions
- Strong collaboration skills in dynamic, cross-functional teams
