StackHawk helps software developers find and fix security vulnerabilities before they deploy code to production. Every modern software development organization has shifted from quarterly releases to daily or hourly releases, incorporating Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). In the modern world of FinTech, HealthTech, cloud analytics and AI platforms, customers are entrusting their most critical data to software providers. Periodic manual security testing by an external team is simply too risky. Because of this, modern software development organizations are extending CI/CD to encompass Continuous Application and API Security Testing. This way, security can “shift left,” meaning vulnerabilities can be detected while the developer is actively working on the code.

StackHawk leads the market in developer first API security testing. Application and API security is an exciting market, where more than 43% of global decision makers are looking to implement dynamic application security testing during software development, which represents a massive opportunity for StackHawk. StackHawk is building out a team of leaders and team members that will capitalize on market pull, and enable growth-phase scale of the business.

Are you an experienced AI engineer eager to design and ship cutting-edge AI systems? Do you want to shape the future of developer-focused security tooling? Can you tolerate ridiculous bird puns? If so, keep reading to learn about an exciting opportunity at StackHawk!

The Role

Join StackHawk's expanding Engineering team as a talented AI Software Engineer! You'll collaborate with our skilled Product Development team to architect, build, and operate production-grade AI features. This pivotal role directly contributes to StackHawk's mission of revolutionizing application security by building agentic (multi-prompt, iterative) AI pipelines, enabling intelligent automation, and delivering reliable, safe, and performant AI capabilities at scale. If you're passionate about bringing state-of-the-art AI into production with rigorous engineering practices, this is your opportunity to make a significant impact.

What You’ll Do

Design & Build AI Systems: Architect and ship Agentic (multi-prompt, iterative) AI pipelines that solve real-world problems at scale.
Productionize AI Features: Bring AI prototypes into robust, production environments, ensuring reliability, performance, and security.
Advance AI Capabilities: Apply state-of-the-art techniques including fine-tuning, transformer models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and model evaluation.
Ensure Quality & Safety: Implement data guardrails, fairness/bias mitigation strategies, and guardrail systems to ensure safe and reliable model outputs.
Collaborate Across Functions: Partner with product, development, and infrastructure teams to deliver high-impact features.
Operate at Scale: Monitor and maintain deployed AI systems using real-time observability.
Set Standards: Establish best practices for testing, evaluation, and continuous improvement of AI/ML features.

What We’re Looking For

Deep AI/ML Expertise
Strong foundation in transformer architectures (encoder-only, decoder-only, and multimodal; e.g., BERT, GPT, LLaMA, Mistral).
Hands-on experience with frontier model tools such as tool calling, MCP, context management, prompt tuning, and evaluation frameworks.
Knowledge of retrieval systems, embeddings, semantic search, and orchestration of complex AI workflows.
Experience with NLP tasks: summarization, entity extraction, dialogue systems, or semantic understanding.
Experience working with frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, including token-based inference and orchestration.

Software Engineering Excellence
Proficiency in Rust or similar high-performance languages (Go, C++, systems-level Python).
Experience building production-grade services in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Strong background in scalability, observability, and distributed systems.

Operational Rigor
Experience deploying and operating AI systems in production.
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and evaluation frameworks.
Commitment to reliability, cost efficiency, and user trust.

Mindset
Quality-minded, with a deep respect for correctness.
Comfortable working at the intersection of research and production engineering.
Collaborative and impact-driven, with a track record of influencing technical direction.

Nice to Have

Background in applied research or experience contributing to open-source AI/ML projects.
Familiarity with compliance and regulatory requirements for AI systems.
Colorado based - our headquarters are in Denver and while we primarily work from home we have lots of fun
We’re headquartered in Colorado and prefer to hire locally, but we welcome strong candidates from anywhere in the U.S.

The Goods

Competitive Compensation: Earn a competitive salary and get an equity stake in the company that we are building together.
Solid Benefits: Health, dental, and vision insurance 100% paid for employees and dependents. Other benefits include life insurance, AD&D, and 401K
Time to Recharge Encouraged: Take what you need, vacation plus ten paid holidays! Unplug, recharge, and come back refreshed
Fun Team and Perks: We do great work and have fun doing it! We take care of our employees… We’ll contribute to your WFH setup and hook you up with occasional at-home perks.
Opportunity to shape the future of AI-powered features in a high-impact environment.
Work alongside a talented, collaborative team at the forefront of applied AI.

$150,000 - $190,000 a year

The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $190,000.

At StackHawk, we constantly strive to create an environment that allows our employees (Hawks) to do the best work of their lives. With our roots beginning in downtown Denver Colorado, we have many folks based in the Mountain time zone with the rest of our Hawks working remotely across the United States

We are also committed to keeping Hawks healthy, motivated, focused, and creative. We've designed our top-notch benefits program with these goals in mind. In a nutshell, we've built a place where we truly love working, we think you will too.

StackHawk is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

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