Staff Software Engineer, Secure Execution
New York · USD 231,000-346,400 · 10+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Sep 30, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 10+ years experience
- Employment
- Full-time
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- New York
- Salary
- USD 231,000-346,400
About the role
- As a Staff Software Engineer on the Security Engineering team, you will join as a founding team member and build the security foundations that let Harvey put increasingly capable AI agents to work.
- You'll lead development of a platform for agents to perform security work, while shaping how agents are sandboxed across our product and internal platforms.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction for secure agent execution, working across Security, Infrastructure, and Product Engineering to turn emerging capabilities and risks into a concrete roadmap.
- Design, build, and operate a platform for security agents to discover and validate vulnerabilities within authorized targets and execution boundaries, producing reproducible evidence that engineers can act on.
- Build reusable controls for agent tool use, code execution, network and filesystem access, resource consumption, and workload lifecycle.
- Integrate with identity and secrets platforms to limit access to the data and credentials each task needs.
- Partner with the owners of Harvey's product sandbox and internal agent platform to make architectural decisions, implement protections, and integrate shared security capabilities into their execution environments.
- Enable internal use of open-source models alongside infrastructure teams, building protections around model serving, agent execution, and sensitive-data handling.
- Develop adversarial tests, evaluations, and telemetry that verify containment and expose failures.
- Build mechanisms to scope, observe, interrupt, and safely terminate agent activity.
- Lead delivery and adoption across teams, mentor engineers, and remain hands-on through implementation and production operation, making clear tradeoffs across security, reliability, latency, and cost.
Requirements
- 10+ years developing and running production software, including technical leadership on initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams.
- Strong software engineering skills in languages such as Go, Rust, Python, or C++, with practical experience in Linux systems, networking, and containerized infrastructure.
- Deep expertise in one or more areas of execution security, such as sandboxing, operating-system isolation, container or virtual-machine security, or platforms that execute untrusted code.
- Experience building shared platforms, services, or libraries and helping other teams adopt them through clear interfaces, documentation, and safe migrations.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, including observability, failure handling, capacity management, and dependable production operation.
- Fluency with AI-assisted engineering and agentic workflows.
- Strong communication and technical judgment, with a record of bringing teams to agreement on ambiguous problems and carrying decisions through to delivery.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with microVMs, hypervisors, or sandbox runtimes such as Firecracker, gVisor, or Kata Containers, or Linux isolation mechanisms such as namespaces, seccomp, and Landlock.
- Experience building agent runtimes, tool-execution frameworks, or automated security-testing platforms.
- Experience with vulnerability research, penetration testing, or adversarial evaluation of agent systems, including turning findings into reproducible tests and effective controls.
- Experience deploying or securing self-hosted inference and open-source models, including isolation of model-serving workloads and protection of sensitive inputs and outputs.
Skills
- Go
- Rust
- Python
- C++
- Linux
- Firecracker
- gVisor
- Kata Containers
- Seccomp
- Landlock