Security Engineering Manager

Job description

**OUR ORIGIN STORY** 🎂 In 2011 SkySlope started as an idea born at the kitchen table of our CEO, with just him and two others. Headquartered in Sacramento, California, we have since grown out of our previous 3 offices and many of our close to 150 employees are spread all across the United States. Those 150 employees support close to 300,000 users across 5,000 offices nationwide and now in Canada as well. Included in that is 8 out of the 15 largest Real Estate Brokerages in the nation. But, despite being happy with what we’ve achieved we know that as industry leaders in our space there’s a lot of work left to be done. All of the growth and success that has happened is a result of us obsessing over building cutting edge software that makes the Real Estate world a better place. We know this only happens by hiring people who don’t just come up with out of the box ideas but hiring people who actually see those ideas through and bring them to life. As we’ve grown, we’ve been fortunate enough to hire plenty of people who possess that quality and realize it’s equally important to hire people who can pair that skill with empathy, collaboration, and a keen sense of urgency. If you’re looking to join a company where you can have real impact and surround yourself with an incredible team of people then look no further. **SKYSLOPE’S CORE VALUES** 💪🏻 These are the principles that helped us get to where we are and they are the principles that will guide us to where we want to go in the future. You can apply them to your professional life, your personal life, to any business and any situation. In no specific hierarchy, our core values are: *Awareness | Execution | Obsession | Ownership | Humility | Radical Candor | Urgency | Greatness | Inches I Fun* **[Learn more about our core values from our CEO, Tyler Smith here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNW0VLFjqzM&t=35s)** **Purpose:** The purpose of the Security Engineering Manager is to build and lead SkySlope's dedicated security engineering team in pursuit of making life better for every real estate agent, broker and service provider. This is a player-coach role: they will design the security engineering program, own its execution, hire and grow the team that delivers it, and stay hands-on in the technical work throughout. SkySlope is making a significant, sustained investment in security engineering, and this role is the foundation of that investment. **Why This Role:** This is a genuine greenfield leadership opportunity. You are not inheriting someone else's program, tooling decisions, or org chart. You will design the program, pick the tools, hire the team, and set the standards, with direct executive sponsorship and a Director of Engineering who currently leads the security function and is invested in your success. SkySlope is also an aggressively pro-AI engineering organization: we treat AI as a security force multiplier for review, triage, and detection engineering, operating within guardrails you will help define. If you want to build a modern security program from first principles, with AI in the toolbox rather than on the threat slide, this is that role. ### Essential Functions *Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.* 1. **Responsible for designing and executing SkySlope's security engineering program.** 1. Own the security roadmap across its major domains: identity and credential standards (short-lived, machine-identity-based credentials and OIDC federation), least-privilege authorization, secrets management, managed-device standards, attack-surface governance, secure SDLC (commit signing and org-wide SAST, dependency and secret scanning), centralized logging and detection, vulnerability disclosure, and AI governance. 2. Sequence and prioritize the program pragmatically, targeting the highest risk reduction per unit of engineering effort first. 3. Own the security-debt register: maintain security work as a visible, prioritized engineering backlog rather than an audit artifact. 4. Own security tooling and vendor decisions, including evaluation, selection, and build-vs-buy judgment. 5. Deliver clear, honest executive reporting on program status, risk posture, and progress. 2. **Responsible for hands-on technical leadership (player-coach).** 1. Lead and participate directly in architecture and design reviews for security-relevant work. 2. Contribute hands-on where it matters most: proofs of concept, detection logic, automation, and reviews. 3. Set and uphold the technical bar for security engineering work across the team. 3. **Responsible for hiring and growing the security team.** 1. Hire security engineers across levels and build an effective, collaborative team. 2. Coach and mentor each direct report through personal and performance management, including growing an early-career engineer into a strong contributor. 3. Build a team culture where security work is engineering work: shipped, measured, and iterated. 4. **Responsible for partnering across the organization.** 1. Work with DevOps, IT, and product engineering teams to embed security standards into how work already gets done — paved roads over gates. 2. Communicate early and often, building trust between security and the rest of engineering. 3. Ensure security guidance is concrete and actionable, not theoretical. 5. **Responsible for making AI a security force multiplier.** 1. Apply AI tooling to security review, triage, and detection engineering, and define the guardrails under which it operates. 2. Shape SkySlope's AI governance standards in partnership with engineering leadership. **Other Duties:** Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. ### Measurables: - Security program milestones defined, communicated, and delivered - Security-debt register established and demonstrably burning down - Team hired, retained, and growing (manager and peer observations) - Quality and clarity of executive reporting ### Experience and Qualities: - Strong senior/staff-level individual contributor background in security engineering, infrastructure engineering, or platform engineering; you have personally built the kinds of systems you will now lead - Demonstrated ability to design and drive a security program or comparable cross-cutting technical initiative from ambiguity to delivery - Working depth in modern cloud security practice: cloud IAM, credential federation, secrets management, secure SDLC, and detection/logging (we run multi-cloud: primarily AWS, a growing GCP footprint, and a small amount of Azure; depth in one cloud and fluency across the rest is fine) - Strong coaching and mentoring skills, with a track record of growing engineers, including those early in their careers - Sound judgment on tooling and vendor decisions, including knowing when to build and when to buy - Clear, direct communicator with executives and with engineers, in writing and in person - Enthusiasm for using AI as a working tool in security engineering; we want practitioners who are energized by this, not skeptical of it - Pragmatism: bias toward risk reduction that ships over frameworks that impress We care about demonstrated ability, not certifications or credentials. If you've built and led this kind of work, we want to talk to you regardless of which letters follow your name. ### Supervisory Responsibility: This position has 2-4 direct reports, including security engineers at multiple levels.