Head of Engineering @ Harden

Palo Alto, CA

About Harden

Harden is the enterprise security and governance platform for AI-built apps. Every AI-generated application ships with the same gaps — hardcoded secrets, missing auth, uncontrolled egress, no audit trail. Harden closes them automatically: build-time SAST and SCA scanning with auto-remediation, a one-page approval report that gates CI/CD, and runtime enforcement that covers egress controls, prompt-injection defense, AI cost caps, and tamper-evident audit logs — all deployed inside the customer's own cloud.

We're a venture-backed startup based in the SF Bay Area. The founding team combines AI/ML research leadership at Google DeepMind and Amazon with product leadership at Verkada and AWS. Enterprise customers are already in production and we're bringing on exceptional engineers to build the infrastructure that makes enterprise AI adoption safe and scalable.

About the role

We’re hiring a Head of Engineering to lead Harden through the next stage of technical scale. This is a pivotal early engineering leadership role for someone who wants to stay close to the code, shape architecture, build the team, and help turn a working product into a robust enterprise platform.

In the near term, we expect this person to spend roughly 50–60% of their time hands-on coding. You’ll lead a small team of approximately 2 direct reports to start, with the opportunity to grow the engineering function over time. This role can grow toward a C-suite leadership position as the company scales.

You’ll partner closely with the founders on product direction, customer deployments, engineering priorities, and tradeoffs across speed, quality, security, and technical debt. You won’t be expected to own the product roadmap alone, but you will be a key voice in shaping what we build and how we build it.

What you’ll do

• Lead engineering for Harden’s AI agent security products across build-time and runtime security.
• Stay hands-on with architecture, implementation, and code, especially as we scale from early deployments to repeatable enterprise-grade systems.
• Build and evolve products that run in customer cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and eventually GCP.
• Help take the AI firewall from prototype/model work into production-ready deployments in customer accounts.
• Make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs around what to ship now, what to harden, and what technical debt to take on or pay down.
• Work closely with customers and customer feedback to understand how enterprises deploy, operate, and secure products like ours.
• Manage, coach, and mentor a small engineering team while continuing to contribute directly.
• Build planning discipline across the team, including realistic scoping, timelines, testing, deployment readiness, and follow-through.
• Help hire and develop future engineering talent as the team grows.

What we’re looking for

• Experience building and shipping cloud infrastructure, developer tools, security products, data platforms, or enterprise SaaS products deployed in customer environments.
• Strong hands-on software engineering ability and recent experience writing production code.
• Experience designing systems that run across multiple clouds or within customer cloud environments.
• Strong architecture and system design judgment, with the ability to simplify when needed and invest in long-term foundations when it matters.
• A track record of leading small teams, mentoring engineers, and earning trust through technical depth and follow-through.
• High agency, ownership, and startup readiness — you can operate with ambiguity, move quickly, and learn fast.
• Strong planning instincts: you can estimate work, identify missing pieces, account for testing and deployment needs, and avoid last-minute heroics.
• Comfort using AI tools as part of engineering workflows while maintaining the judgment and technical skill to verify, debug, and own the output.
• Motivation to build in a very early-stage company and take a meaningful equity-driven bet.

Nice to have

• Security experience, especially in DevSecOps, application security, cloud security, or agent/AI security.
• Experience at an early-stage startup, as a founder, or in a 0-to-1 or 1-to-10 environment.
• Experience at a larger infrastructure, cloud, or security company followed by more recent startup experience.
• Experience with products that handle sensitive customer data or deploy into enterprise environments.
• Familiarity with modern AI coding tools and LLM-based developer workflows.

Working style and location

Harden is based in Palo Alto. We strongly prefer someone who can spend significant time in the office with the founders and engineering team. The team currently works with a high-intensity, high-ownership culture.

For this role, we expect strong availability and responsiveness, especially for collaboration on architecture, customer deployments, and fast-moving product decisions. We prefer candidates who are able to work in person around 4 days per week, and we are open to discussing flexibility for exceptional candidates.

Compensation

The expected base salary range is approximately $250k - $300k, depending on the balance of cash and equity. Equity will be meaningful for the right candidate and will depend on seniority, experience, and mutual fit. We recognize how important this person will be to our company!

Why join Harden

AI coding agents are changing how software is built, but they also introduce new security risks that enterprises are only beginning to understand. Harden is building directly in that gap: helping companies adopt AI development workflows while protecting their code, data, and cloud environments.

This is an opportunity to join at the earliest stage, work directly with the founders, build foundational infrastructure for a rapidly emerging category, and shape the engineering culture from the ground up.