Head of security

About us:

Airtm is a financial-infrastructure company building the future of the online-work economy. We are on a mission to empower the world's growing number of Digital Entrepreneurs in the Global South, giving them the financial freedom to thrive.

The problem is clear: in emerging markets, accessing the dollar economy is difficult. Cross-border payments are slow, expensive, and often lose value to inflation. This limits the potential of millions of talented individuals.

Airtm’s solution is a swift and comprehensive financial platform that facilitates low-value cross-border payments and local cash-outs. As pioneers in stablecoin-payment infrastructure, Airtm has built the most advanced cross-border payment system available on the market.

As a company married to the world of online work, Airtm will go beyond payments to build the necessary infrastructure the online-work economy needs to thrive. We are fostering an entirely new economy, giving individuals, communities, and countries the tools to take control of their financial destinies.

About the Role

We're looking for a Head of Security to build and lead security at Airtm, reporting to the VP of Engineering. You'll own the security posture of the systems that move people's money across borders, from application code and cloud infrastructure to identity, vendors, and incident response. You'll set the strategy, build the team and the practices around it, and stay hands-on enough to make the hard technical calls yourself.

Our stack is TypeScript/Node.js microservices on Kubernetes (AWS), with React front ends, organized into autonomous product teams. Security here works as an enabler embedded in how teams ship, not a gate at the end. AI-assisted development is core to how we build, so you'll be expected to use AI tooling fluently for security work, and to define how we adopt AI agents and LLM-powered systems safely.

Key Responsibilities

• Security Strategy & Roadmap: Define and own a risk-based security strategy for a financial platform; prioritize investment by real threat and business impact, and report on posture to executive leadership and the board

• Incident Response: Own detection, response, and recovery for security incidents; maintain runbooks, lead incidents and post-incident reviews, coordinate with forensics, legal, and communications, and turn every incident into lasting improvements

• Application Security: Embed security into the SDLC with threat modeling, secure design reviews, SAST/DAST/dependency scanning, and secure coding standards that engineers actually adopt

• Cloud & Infrastructure Security: Partner with Infrastructure to harden AWS, Kubernetes, networking, and CI/CD pipelines; own IAM and least-privilege access, secrets management, and security in Terraform and GitOps workflows

• Detection & Monitoring: Build the detection and alerting capability that finds malicious activity early, across application, infrastructure, and access logs, and tune it to keep signal high

• Crypto & Key Security: Own the security model for key management, wallet and custody operations, and the blockchain integrations our payment rails depend on

• Fraud & Account Security Collaboration: Work with Product and Risk teams on account takeover, abuse, and transaction-level controls

• AI Security: Define guardrails for AI coding tools and for AI agents and LLM pipelines we build or deploy, including agent permissions, prompt injection, data exposure, and tool-access boundaries

• Compliance & Assurance: Own our security compliance program (SOC 2 and related frameworks), audits, and customer and partner security questionnaires, aiming to make compliance a byproduct of good engineering rather than a separate burden

• Vendor & Third-Party Risk: Run vendor risk assessments and security due diligence for partners, investors, and acquirers

• Vulnerability & Patch Management: Establish clear SLAs by severity and keep remediation moving across teams without becoming a bottleneck

• Team Building & Mentorship: Hire, grow, and lead security engineers; build a security champions network inside product teams; raise the security bar across all of engineering

• On-Call & Escalation: Participate in and help shape the security escalation path for production incidents

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in information or application security, including 3+ years leading security teams or functions

• Demonstrated experience leading incident response for real, high-stakes incidents, including coordination with external forensics and counsel

• Strong knowledge of AWS security and Kubernetes security (IAM, network segmentation, RBAC, secrets management, container and image security)

• Hands-on experience with application security in a microservices environment: threat modeling, secure code review, and dependency and supply-chain risk

• Experience building detection and monitoring capabilities (SIEM, log analysis, alerting; Datadog or similar)

• Experience owning or leading a compliance program such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or PCI-DSS, including audit cycles

• Ability to read and review TypeScript/Node.js code and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform); you don't need to be a full-time developer, but you need to be credible with engineers

• Experience securing CI/CD pipelines and software supply chains

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) for security work, and a clear point of view on the risks of AI-generated code and agentic systems

• Strong communication skills; able to explain risk to engineers, executives, regulators, and customers, and to write policies and runbooks people follow

• Sound judgment under pressure; able to make fast, defensible calls with incomplete information

Nice to Have

• Background in fintech, payments, remittance, or crypto environments, especially key management, custody, and blockchain security

• Experience with fraud, account takeover, and abuse prevention

• Experience securing AI agents and LLM-powered systems in production (prompt injection defenses, tool-permission models, eval and red-teaming approaches)

• Hands-on offensive security experience (penetration testing, red teaming) or running bug bounty programs

• Experience with cloud-native security tooling (CSPM, runtime protection, policy-as-code such as OPA/Kyverno)

• Familiarity with regulatory requirements for money transmission and financial services across multiple jurisdictions

• Security certifications (CISSP, CISM, OSCP, AWS Security Specialty)

• Experience supporting investor, buyer, or enterprise due diligence on security posture

• Experience building a security function from a small base in a fast-growing engineering org

What We Look For

Beyond the technical skills, we're looking for a leader who:

• Takes ownership of security outcomes, stays calm and clear in an incident, and communicates early when risk is rising

• Treats security as a partnership with engineers, building guardrails and paved roads rather than gates and tickets

• Has good judgment about risk, knowing when to stop a release, when a small risk is worth the speed, and how to explain the tradeoff to the business

• Improves the team around them, through mentorship, champions, and making secure choices the easy ones

• Collaborates across boundaries, working with Product, Infrastructure, Legal, Compliance, and Support as one team

• Knows when (and when not) to lean on AI tooling, and brings rigor to how we adopt it safely

Compensation

Additional Information