Senior Engineer

The Atlantic is looking for a hands-on Senior Engineer to help us deliver industry-leading security across our applications and services. We aim to support a more thoughtful American public by powering and expanding our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism — and we want the products we ship to be worthy of that mission.

This is a unique opportunity to contribute to innovative, high-profile projects: you will configure, program, and integrate advanced security systems, working closely with engineering teams to keep our platforms seamless, secure, and reliable.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant hands-on work in security engineering

• Strong backend programming ability and comfort with general DevOps work (CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, cloud platforms)

• Deep understanding of secure software design and modern application security practices, including zero trust principles

• Hands-on experience with IAM, WAFs, and secure data access controls

• A track record of owning security incidents end to end — triage, root cause, and durable fixes

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience securing agentic and LLM-driven workflows against over-access, data exfiltration, and backdoors

• Experience developing security tooling and automation

• Familiarity with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and an infrastructure-as-code tool (Terraform or similar)

• Background in consumer-facing web or mobile products

• Experience using observability and monitoring tools (Datadog, Sentry) as security and quality signals in production

• Familiarity with threat modeling and secure-by-design architecture

As The Atlantic's Senior Security Engineer, you will:

• Partner with engineering teams to architect applications with security and data protection built in from the start, including zero trust networking and secure data access controls

• Review architecture diagrams, code, and proposals to spot security issues before they ship

• Secure agentic and LLM-driven workflows to prevent over-access, data exfiltration, and backdoors

• Work with Operations to stand up and tune WAFs and IAM

• Develop tooling that makes it easier to secure our applications and company data

• Triage security incidents, identify root causes, and build solutions that prevent recurrence

• Participate in on-call rotation (outside of standard business hours) to monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve production incidents, ensuring system reliability and uptime.

• Contribute to general DevOps and backend engineering across company-wide architecture

• The role will at times include night, early-morning, and weekend work.

As The Atlantic's Senior Security Engineer, you are:

• A builder, deep and broad: This is fundamentally an engineering role — you'd rather build, architect, and solve hard technical problems than manage a checklist. You're equally at home in backend code, infrastructure, and DevOps, and you measure your impact in systems shipped and risks eliminated, not tickets tracked.

• Security-minded by design: You think like an attacker, architect defensively, and build security into systems rather than bolting it on afterward.

• AI-fluent: You understand how agentic and LLM-driven systems create new categories of security risk, and you're excited to work out how to secure them.

• A collaborator: You embed naturally with engineering teams and help them build securely by partnering on solutions — earning trust rather than enforcing from the outside.

• Pragmatic: You balance strong security with the need to ship, and you gravitate toward the simplest solution that genuinely reduces risk.

• A strong communicator: You can articulate security risk and tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

• An interest in the pursuit of truth: You believe in what The Atlantic does and want the products we ship to reflect that.

Salary minimum: $115,000; Salary maximum: $140,000

This role is based in Washington, D.C. 

This is a Guild position.