Design and implement AI systems, productionize AI features, ensure quality and safety, monitor deployed systems, and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
StackHawk is reimagining AppSec for AI-driven development, where applications are built faster than AppSec tools can keep up. We enable AppSec teams to prioritize testing and fixing what matters with our AppSec Intelligence Platform, which combines scalable runtime testing with attack surface discovery from source code. By delivering real-time visibility and centralized program intelligence, StackHawk empowers AppSec teams to evaluate risk, prove value, and scale testing coverage.
The reality: AI has accelerated development velocity by 3-5x, enabling code to be written faster than AppSec teams can track it, while threat actors launch attacks at machine speed. Meanwhile, security teams are stuck with tools that can't keep up—SAST creates alert fatigue, legacy DAST catches issues too late, and there's no visibility into what apps exist or how secure they are. Security can't just keep up with AI innovation—it has to fuel it.
StackHawk is already proving this vision in the market, with hundreds of customers—including household Fortune 100 brands across the airline, food & beverage, healthcare, and insurance industries—relying on our platform to secure their rapidly evolving applications. We’ve achieved top-quartile growth and exceptional customer retention, driven by strong inbound demand from security and developer teams who feel the pain of today’s tooling gap. With a rapidly expanding partner ecosystem and a clear path to massive scale, StackHawk is poised to become the AppSec intelligence layer powering the next generation of AI-accelerated software development.
Are you an experienced AI engineer eager to design and ship cutting-edge AI systems? Do you want to shape the future of developer-focused security tooling? Can you tolerate ridiculous bird puns? If so, keep reading to learn about an exciting opportunity at StackHawk!
The Role
Join StackHawk's expanding Engineering team as a talented AI Software Engineer! You'll collaborate with our skilled Product Development team to architect, build, and operate production-grade AI features. This pivotal role directly contributes to StackHawk's mission of revolutionizing application security by building agentic (multi-prompt, iterative) AI pipelines, enabling intelligent automation, and delivering reliable, safe, and performant AI capabilities at scale. If you're passionate about bringing state-of-the-art AI into production with rigorous engineering practices, this is your opportunity to make a significant impact.
What You’ll Do
- Design & Build AI Systems: Architect and ship Agentic (multi-prompt, iterative) AI pipelines that solve real-world problems at scale.
- Productionize AI Features: Bring AI prototypes into robust, production environments, ensuring reliability, performance, and security.
- Advance AI Capabilities: Apply state-of-the-art techniques including fine-tuning, transformer models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and model evaluation.
- Ensure Quality & Safety: Implement data guardrails, fairness/bias mitigation strategies, and guardrail systems to ensure safe and reliable model outputs.
- Collaborate Across Functions: Partner with product, development, and infrastructure teams to deliver high-impact features.
- Operate at Scale: Monitor and maintain deployed AI systems using real-time observability.
- Set Standards: Establish best practices for testing, evaluation, and continuous improvement of AI/ML features.
What We’re Looking For
- Deep AI/ML Expertise
- Strong foundation in transformer architectures (encoder-only, decoder-only, and multimodal; e.g., BERT, GPT, LLaMA, Mistral).
- Hands-on experience with frontier model tools such as tool calling, MCP, context management, prompt tuning, and evaluation frameworks.
- Knowledge of retrieval systems, embeddings, semantic search, and orchestration of complex AI workflows.
- Experience with NLP tasks: summarization, entity extraction, dialogue systems, or semantic understanding.
- Experience working with frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, including token-based inference and orchestration.
- Software Engineering Excellence
- Proficiency in Rust or similar high-performance languages (Go, C++, systems-level Python).
- Experience building production-grade services in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Strong background in scalability, observability, and distributed systems.
- Operational Rigor
- Experience deploying and operating AI systems in production.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and evaluation frameworks.
- Commitment to reliability, cost efficiency, and user trust.
- Mindset
- Quality-minded, with a deep respect for correctness.
- Comfortable working at the intersection of research and production engineering.
- Collaborative and impact-driven, with a track record of influencing technical direction.
Nice to Have
- Background in applied research or experience contributing to open-source AI/ML projects.
- Familiarity with compliance and regulatory requirements for AI systems.
- Colorado based - our headquarters are in Denver and while we primarily work from home we have lots of fun
- We’re headquartered in Colorado and prefer to hire locally, but we welcome strong candidates from anywhere in the U.S.
The Goods
- Competitive Compensation: Earn a competitive salary and get an equity stake in the company that we are building together.
- Solid Benefits: Health, dental, and vision insurance 100% paid for employees and dependents. Other benefits include life insurance, AD&D, and 401K
- Time to Recharge Encouraged: Take what you need, vacation plus ten paid holidays! Unplug, recharge, and come back refreshed
- Fun Team and Perks: We do great work and have fun doing it! We take care of our employees… We’ll contribute to your WFH setup and hook you up with occasional at-home perks.
- Opportunity to shape the future of AI-powered features in a high-impact environment.
- Work alongside a talented, collaborative team at the forefront of applied AI.
At StackHawk, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hawks) to do the best work of their lives. With our roots beginning in downtown Denver Colorado, we have many folks based in the Mountain time zone with the rest of our Hawks working remotely across the United States
We are also committed to keeping Hawks healthy, motivated, focused, and creative. We've designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we've built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.
StackHawk is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!
Top Skills
AI
AWS
Azure
C++
GCP
Go
Ml
Python
Rust
Transformer Architectures
StackHawk Denver, Colorado, USA Office
StackHawk was started in Denver Colorado and transitioned to a fully remote company post COVID and we plan on staying remote. Of course, we also understand that in-person interaction is important for all of us as individuals and as a company. So we also organize a few company events year-round.
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