Staff Security Engineer

Who is Sonar?

Sonar helps prevent code quality and code security issues from reaching production, amplifies developers' productivity in concert with AI assistants, and improves the developer experience with streamlined workflows. Sonar analyzes all code, regardless of who writes it — your internal team, genAI, or third parties — resulting in more secure, reliable, and maintainable applications. Rooted in the open source community, Sonar’s solutions support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Today, Sonar is used by +7M developers and 400K organizations worldwide, including the DoD, Microsoft, NASA, MasterCard, Siemens, and T-Mobile.

We believe in developing great products that are supported by great internal teams and a strong culture. We are highly committed to and obsessed with the company, users, each other, and our open source community. We have high standards and hold each other accountable for acting with positivity, dedication, thoughtfulness, empathy, and passion daily.

We are deliberate with our decisions with high clarity of intention. At the same time, we feel extreme urgency and move forward quickly.

And lastly, we are highly effective and operationally efficient. We operate collectively as One Team to accomplish our goals.

At Sonar, CODE is more than just an acronym – it's a mindset that defines daily operations.

Why You Should Apply:

At Sonar, we’re a group of brilliant, motivated, and driven professionals working hard to help supercharge developers to build better, faster. Sonar helps to continuously improve code quality and code security while reducing developer toil. This means that developers can focus on doing more of what they love and less of what they don’t. Our solutions don’t just solve symptoms of problems – we help fix issues at the source – for all code, whether it's developer-written, AI-generated, or from third parties.

We have a dynamic culture with employees worldwide and hub offices in the USA, Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and Germany. Team members should be able to come to work every day, work on a product they are proud of, love what they do, and feel energized by their peers. With our roots deep in the open source community, we’re all about the mission: supercharge developers to build better, faster.

The Impact You Will Have:

Based in Sonar’s Austin office and working closely with the CISO, you will be the trusted security expert for senior leadership, engineering teams, and, when needed, the incident management team, bringing clarity, calm, and expertise when it matters most.

The primary goal of the Information Security team is to earn deep trust with our rapidly growing customer base by relentlessly safeguarding Sonar products and our cloud platforms, while consistently demonstrating that Sonar meets demanding, industry‑leading security standards.

You will drive the strategy and champion security by design by partnering with product, platform, and infrastructure engineering teams, ensuring that our products, cloud platforms, and networks are designed, built, and operated to meet Sonar’s high security bar.

Through Sonar’s “collective intelligence” mindset, your curiosity, creativity, and positive influence will amplify the impact of the entire organization and directly fuel the company’s growth.

What You Will Do Daily::
• Security Strategy: Support the development of strategic security goals and maintain their alignment with the company mission and priorities.

• Secure by design: Closely collaborate with product engineering teams to co‑create secure, resilient solutions, bringing security considerations into the earliest stages of design.

• Secure by design: Review product architectures and cloud solutions with a critical and curious eye, ensuring security requirements are not only integrated but actively shape the final design.

• Offensive security: Drive internal and external security reviews, penetration tests, and red‑team exercises that challenge assumptions and reveal real‑world attack paths, periodically.

• Offensive security: Lead the selection, coordination, and oversight of external pen testing services and security certifications, transforming their findings into meaningful improvements.

• Projects and initiatives: Drive high‑impact security initiatives from the strategic security plan — from evaluating new approaches to rolling out cutting‑edge tools and capabilities across the organization.

• Customer trust: Investigate and manage customer security concerns with empathy and rigor, turning challenging questions into opportunities to deepen trust.

• Resolve security issues: Dive into complex security findings in products and internal systems, investigate root causes, and guide teams to robust, sustainable remediation.

• Security incidents: Act as a security subject matter expert during security incidents, helping teams to quickly understand, contain, and learn from emerging threats.

The Experience You Will Need: :
• You can demonstrate in‑depth experience with cloud architectures - primarily AWS and distributed networks, and you’re motivated to keep exploring how modern cloud patterns can both strengthen and weaken security.

• You can demonstrate deep experience with application security assessments, including reviewing code and evaluating authentication and authorization designs with a high level of curiosity and rigor.

• You can demonstrate experience assessing and securing AI, Agentic and MCPs, and you are eager to experiment, learn, and define best practices in this fast‑moving space.

• You can demonstrate experience in penetration testing, red‑team engagements, and bug bounty programs, and you enjoy thinking like an attacker to protect what matters most.

• You can demonstrate experience with vulnerability investigation and management, from triage and prioritization to driving remediation and learning across teams.

• You can demonstrate experience with threat modeling using frameworks like STRIDE, and you naturally use these techniques to spark better design discussions.

• You can demonstrate hands-on experience with coding, “vibe‑coding,” and scripting (for example, Python, Bash), and you enjoy building small tools and experiments that make security work faster and smarter.

• Familiarity with Azure, GCP, and Google Workspace is a plus and so is a desire to keep learning new platforms and ecosystems as Sonar evolves.

Why You Will Love It Here::
• Our culture and mission set us apart. We have a dynamic work culture that values respect and kindness and embraces the right to fail (and get right back up again!).

• Great people make a great company. We value people skills as much as technical skills and strive to keep things friendly while still being passionate leaders in our domains.

• We have a flexible work policy that includes 3 days in-office and 2 days work-from-home each week for those located near our office locations; some locations such as Dubai, India, Japan and Australia operate fully remotely.

• We have a growth mindset. We love learning and believe continuous education is critical to our success. In an ever-changing industry, new skills are necessary, and we're happy to help our team acquire them.

• As the leader in our field, our products and services are as strong as our internal team members.

• We embrace transparency with regular meetings, cascading messages and updates on the growth and success of our organization.

Benefits of Working with Sonar::
• Flexible comprehensive employee benefit package.

• We encourage usage of our robust time-off allocations. You will receive 23 days of PTO per calendar year (on a pro-rated basis depending on your employment start date), with additional time provided for sickness, life events and holidays.

• We offer an exciting 401(k) plan that has a 4% match, fully vested on day one of participation.

• Generous discretionary Company Growth Bonus, paid annually.

• Fully paid parking in the heart of downtown Austin, Texas.

• Global workforce with employees in 20+ countries representing 35+ unique nationalities.

• We have an annual kick-off somewhere in the world where we meet to build relationships and goals for the company.

• Monthly catered events, and team events.

We Value Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

At Sonar, we believe that our diversity is our strength. We are a global company that values and respects different backgrounds, perspectives, and cultures.

We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

All offers of employment at Sonar are contingent upon the precise results of a comprehensive background check and reference verification conducted before the start date.

We do not currently support visa candidates in the US.

Applications that are submitted through agencies or third party recruiters will not be considered.