Forward Deployed Security Engineer (AppSec)

About Cantina

Cantina's mission is to Secure the Universe.

We are living through a unique moment in cybersecurity. AI is making attackers faster, more capable, and easier to scale. But it also gives defenders a narrow window to change the balance.

We believe the future of security is autonomous. Instead of waiting for a person to run a scan, triage an alert, or start a response, security agents should work continuously: understanding your systems, watching for changes, investigating problems, taking action within guardrails, and verifying that each issue is actually resolved.

Security should not be a collection of tools that tell humans where to look. It should become an always-on system that protects everything you build. That is the future we are building toward at Cantina Security.

Apex is an autonomous offensive security engineer. It reasons across code like a senior security researcher: forming and testing vulnerability hypotheses, validating real issues, helping teams remediate them, and verifying the fix.

Clarion brings the same idea to security operations. It continuously watches a company's environment, investigates signals, prioritizes what matters, and helps teams respond.

Read our Secure the Universe manifesto. This belief is also why Cantina signed OpenAI's call for collective action on cyber defense.

The role

We are looking for a Solutions Engineer to make Apex successful inside customer organizations.

You will own the technical customer experience from initial evaluation through onboarding and ongoing adoption. You will help teams scope their first scans, integrate Apex into their development workflow, interpret results, and turn findings into action.

This is a hands-on role at the intersection of security engineering, product, and customer success. You will work directly with customers, Product, and Engineering, and have a meaningful influence on how Apex evolves.

What you will own

Customer onboarding and activation

• Lead technical onboarding for new Apex customers.
• Understand each customer's architecture, attack surface, and security goals.
• Help customers scope and run their first successful scans.
• Configure repository access and development workflow integrations.
• Get customers from kickoff to useful, reviewed results quickly.

Technical guidance

• Help engineering and security teams understand, prioritize, and act on Apex findings.
• Advise customers on remediation and post-fix verification.
• Troubleshoot integrations, scan configuration, and unexpected results.
• Run technical workshops, office hours, and architecture discussions.
• Become the technical person customers trust when the answer is not obvious.

Adoption and customer outcomes

• Drive Apex from a successful first scan into a repeatable security workflow.
• Identify where customers are blocked, confused, or not seeing enough value.
• Create lightweight playbooks and onboarding material that make future deployments faster.
• Work with customer and internal owners to keep evaluations and deployments moving.

Product feedback

• Capture customer pain with enough technical detail for Product and Engineering to act.
• Reproduce issues and distinguish product gaps from configuration problems.
• Identify repeated customer needs that should become product capabilities.
• Help the team decide what will materially improve adoption, reliability, and time to value.

What success looks like

• Customers reach a useful first result quickly.
• Findings are reviewed, understood, and acted on.
• Customers run Apex again because it has become part of how they secure software.
• Technical issues reach Engineering with clear evidence and reproduction steps.
• Each deployment makes the next one easier.

What we are looking for

• Experience in application security, product security, security engineering, or a technical customer-facing role at a security company.
• Strong understanding of software vulnerabilities, modern application architecture, and the development lifecycle.
• Comfortable reading code, logs, API responses, and technical documentation.
• Experience troubleshooting APIs, authentication, repository access, and developer-tool integrations.
• Basic scripting ability in Python, JavaScript, Bash, or a similar language.
• Able to explain complex security issues clearly to engineers, security leaders, and executives.
• Comfortable leading customer calls and working through ambiguous technical problems.
• High ownership and urgency. You follow problems through until the customer has a real outcome.

Deep expertise in every language or security tool is not required. We care more about whether you can understand a system, investigate what is happening, and help a customer make progress.

Nice to have

• Experience with code review, penetration testing, vulnerability research, or secure software development.
• Experience with GitHub, GitLab, CI/CD systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience deploying AI, developer, or security products into enterprise environments.
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k).
• The opportunity to help build a new category of AI-native security alongside an ambitious, highly technical team.