Member Of Technical Staff, CTO Office
Summary
IC in the CTO Office at an AI-agent-security startup who incubates new ideas, designs solutions, and ships working POCs proving the technical reality of emerging AI agent attack classes, then hands successful capabilities off to Engineering and Product.
About Us:
Zenity is the leader in AI Agent Security and the first company to bring an agent-centric security platform to market. As enterprises accelerate AI agent adoption, we are establishing the security framework for how AI agents are secured and governed at enterprise scale.
We deliver full-lifecycle visibility, governance, detection, prevention, and response for AI agents from build time to runtime, across SaaS, home-grown platforms, and end-user devices. Backed by $180M+ in total funding, including a $125M Series C led by Norwest, with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Microsoft's M12, Zenity is trusted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises worldwide.
Join us in shaping how AI agents are secured at enterprise scale.
About the Role:
The CTO Office is Zenity’s core discovery engine, dedicated to navigating the rapid evolution in AI agent security and “building the lighthouse.” We are a high-agency team of ICs with integrated Engineering, Research, and Product mindsets. Our mission: incubate new ideas, define the approach to emerging attack classes, and build working POCs that prove technical reality. Guided by the CTO, Product, and GTM, we validate hard, open problems and actively support the Product organization by opening new development paths and seamlessly handing over advanced capabilities.
What You’ll Do
Responsibilities:
- Take a hard, open problem in AI agent security from “this might be possible” to a working POC that proves the Zenity approach, grounded in technical reality.
- Partner closely with Product, R&D, Zenity Labs, and GTM. Don’t just write about emerging problems. Think them through, design the solution, and POC it so customers see something real.
- Own the end-to-end loop: scope the problem, build the prototype, evaluate it, document the approach, ship it.
- Make the calls on architecture, tooling, and tradeoffs.
- When a POC succeeds, own the handover to Engineering and Product. When a new direction needs its own team, lead the incubation.
- Stay ahead of the rapid evolution in AI and proactively identify emerging trends.
Requirements
Requirements:
- Engineering. 7+ years building real production systems, with both application and infrastructure depth. You’ve shipped, scaled, and operated real systems, not just prototyped them. Experience architecting solutions across diverse environments and platforms. Expertise with modern programming languages such as Python/TypeScript/Go/C#/Java, and experience running large-scale services on AWS/Azure/GCP.
- AI. Hands-on experience building with LLMs and AI agents. You understand how they work, where they fail, and how to instrument and reason about them, not just call an API. You are fluent with AI-assisted coding.
- Cybersecurity. Experience in the cybersecurity space. You can follow a security conversation with offensive researchers and defensive practitioners.
- Product mindset. You can hold “is this the right thing to build?” in tension with “is this technically feasible?” and decide both. You care about who the user is and what they need.
- Agency. Comfortable starting from a blank page, working without a spec, and being the one who defines what “done” looks like. You move fast, ship POCs, write the doc, and tell the story.
- Experience with AI agents and AI agent security
- Experience with: inline instrumentation, eBPF, CASB, Sandbox - Advantage
- Former cybersecurity founder/CTO - Advantage