Member of Technical Staff – Security

Hone builds AI that owns outcomes, not tasks: agentic systems that work towards goals over weeks and months, deploy themselves, and improve over time.

ABOUT HONE

Models keep getting smarter, but outside of coding most organizations can't absorb that intelligence, and the gap between model capability and the value derived from it keeps widening. The reasons are many, from human incentives to org design, but at the core we think it's a technology problem. Hone builds engines: AI systems that you hand a goal, like "keep the recruiting pipeline healthy." An engine builds itself, maintains its own agents and code, pulls in people when it needs judgment, and learns from every correction.

In October 2026, we announced a $60M seed round https://hone.com/blog/introducing-engines/ from Benchmark and Index Ventures.

- Half our team are former founders: They’ve built companies, shipped products, and chosen Hone as the place to build next. The rest of us come from Cognition, Mercor, Ramp, Jane Street, Decagon, Brex and Harvey

- Our customers are building with AI themselves: Cognition, Modal and Lucanet already use Hone, with customer perspectives featured on our website https://hone.com/

- Our founders have built from research to scale: They researched agents at Stanford, built the core of Devin at Cognition, led enterprise engineering at Mercor, built internal AI platforms, and founded companies that reached over one million users

- We measure our work by economic impact: Engines are deployed across revenue, procurement, risk, product and operations, and we judge them by the results they create, not benchmark scores

- Our values shape how we work: Own the Outcome, Set the Standard, Win with Class, and Commit to the Racing Line. Read more on our careers page https://hone.com/careers/

- Read more: Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-08/former-openai-cognition-staffers-want-ai-to-help-run-a-business, Index Ventures’ investment thesis https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/ai-that-owns-business-outcomes-our-investment-in-hone/, and our launch announcement https://hone.com/blog/introducing-engines/

THE ROLE

Engines act inside a company's most sensitive systems for weeks or months, with real permissions and on their own schedule. That makes security a new kind of problem: any input can be an attack, the actor is an agent, and the blast radius is vast. You'll own security across Hone: the isolation and identity model every engine runs under, the controls that let enterprises trust engines with their systems and data, and the defenses against agent-specific threats.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

- Isolation and network sandboxing for long-running agents: default-deny egress, scoped access, tenant isolation.

- Identity and credentials for engines: per-engine service identities, short-lived scoped credentials, and a broker so agents never hold raw secrets.

- Defenses against prompt injection, data exfiltration and tool misuse across untrusted inputs.

- Permissions and audit: RBAC, approval gates, and a full record of every action an engine takes and why.

- Security architecture for single-tenant and customer-VPC deployments.

- Internal AI tooling for detection, review and response, including agents that red-team our own engines.

REQUIREMENTS

- 2+ years of security engineering experience, or equivalent depth from research, CTFs, open source or your own projects

- Time at a fast-growing startup

- You've designed and built security systems from scratch, not just audited them

- You've secured production systems under real load and handled real incidents

- Strong fundamentals: cloud security, identity and access, networking, isolation, application security

- You use coding agents every day and still understand every line you ship

- You break and build things for fun because you genuinely care about how systems fail

NICE TO HAVE

- Agent or LLM security experience: prompt injection, sandbox escapes, red-teaming models or agents

- You've taken an enterprise product through security reviews and audits. A CTF background is a plus.

HOW WE HIRE

1. Intro with a co-founder.

2. Technical screen.

3. Security deep dive.

4. Two-day work trial in San Francisco.

5. References.

6. Offer.

LOGISTICS

- Location: San Francisco, in person, Sunday to Friday.

- Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity.

- Visa: We sponsor visas and support you through the immigration process.

- Benefits: Health and dental insurance, maternity and parental support, and relocation support.