Application Security Engineer
Job Description
Compest Solutions Inc is hiring an Application Security Engineer / AI Security Engineer on a contract basis to strengthen security engineering across application security, cloud services, APIs, and AI/LLM integrations. This onsite role supports practical security outcomes through design reviews, hands-on adversarial testing, and security automation in fast-moving engineering environments.
Location: Onsite in Seattle, Washington and Sunnyvale, California. Local candidates are required.
Compensation: USD 50–55 per hour
Position type: Contract
Responsibilities
- Conduct security and privacy design reviews for applications, APIs, cloud services, engineering proposals, and AI integrations.
- Review system architecture and data flows, including access controls, trust boundaries, authentication, authorization, and other security safeguards.
- Perform threat modeling for critical services and AI agents, mapping attack surfaces, scenarios, attack paths, mitigations, and residual risks.
- Deliver hands-on security and adversarial testing for AI/LLM agents, including:
- Prompt injection
- Tool misuse
- Excessive agency
- Unauthorized data access
- Permission and access-control issues
- External integrations
- Sensitive-data exposure
- Identify, validate, and document security vulnerabilities, then provide practical remediation recommendations.
- Collaborate with engineering, security, privacy, and third-party teams to drive remediation and validate security controls.
- Develop reusable security assessment assets including methodologies, checklists, threat models, test cases, and reporting templates.
- Support security automation and AI-assisted security workflows where appropriate.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional experience in security engineering, application security, product security, offensive security, systems architecture, or a related technical security field.
- Experience reviewing complex technical designs and identifying security risks in:
- Applications
- APIs
- Cloud services
- Microservices
- Distributed systems
- Strong understanding of threat modeling, vulnerability assessment, and risk modeling.
- Strong understanding of authentication and authorization, least-privilege principles, and data protection.
- Strong understanding of security architecture.
- Hands-on experience with security testing, vulnerability investigation, penetration testing, adversarial testing, or security-control validation.
- Strong technical communication skills, with the ability to explain security findings to engineering and business stakeholders.
Technologies
- Python
- Go
- Bash
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience assessing AI/LLM applications and autonomous AI agents.
- Knowledge of prompt injection, jailbreaks, unsafe tool use, excessive agency, and AI data-security risks.
- Experience with privacy and security design reviews.
- Experience securing cloud environments.
- Security automation experience using Python, Go, Bash (or similar languages).
- Familiarity with application-security frameworks and industry security practices.
Key Skills
- Application Security
- AI/LLM Security
- Threat Modeling
- Penetration Testing
- Adversarial Testing
- Cloud Security
- API Security
- Security Architecture
- Vulnerability Assessment
- Privacy & Data Protection
- Python/Go/Bash
- Security Automation
Onsite (in person) work location: Seattle, Washington and Sunnyvale, California.