---
title: 'Platform Security Engineer at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/platform-security-engineer-outset-san-francisco-t92pgz80ddez'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Platform Security Engineer at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $210k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/18583f35-f1d5-41ad-9924-2bda6f5435ad

## Job description

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

We are looking for an experienced Platform Security Engineer to harden the security of the systems that power our business and products. You will help us secure both our AWS infrastructure and our code base, partnering directly with engineering and other security teams to identify risk, improve architecture, investigate incidents, and build practical security controls. The role combines application, cloud and infrastructure security, detection engineering, and incident investigation. During security and privacy incidents, you will serve as the lead technical investigator for the platform. You will work closely with the Incident Commander (Head of Security), to determine what happened, understand the impact, preserve relevant evidence, and guide containment and remediation.

## Responsibilities

- Identify, assess, and help remediate security risks across our AWS infrastructure, Terraform code, application architecture, and product code.
- Partner with engineering teams to design secure systems and incorporate security into normal development and operational workflows.
- Participate in security reviews of RFC and PRR documentation, providing clear, actionable feedback on architecture, data flows, access controls, abuse cases, and technical risk.
- Review application and infrastructure changes where additional security scrutiny is warranted.
- Participate in external penetration tests, including preparation, technical coordination, analysis of findings, remediation planning, and validation of fixes.
- Help improve the effectiveness and repeatability of the penetration-testing program, with the opportunity to assume ownership of the program over time.
- Serve as the lead platform investigator during security and privacy incidents, working within the incident-response process led by the Head of Security.
- Analyze application, cloud, identity, network, audit, and infrastructure telemetry to determine the scope, impact, and root cause of incidents.
- Translate investigation findings into containment actions, durable remediations, improved detections, and clear technical documentation.
- Contribute to the design, implementation, tuning, and maintenance of SIEM detection rules that monitor our platform.
- Investigate and respond to alerts involving AWS infrastructure, application behavior, access patterns, data movement, and other platform activity.
- Improve logging and telemetry where existing data is insufficient to detect threats or investigate incidents.
- Develop security tooling and automation that help engineers identify and address vulnerabilities earlier.
- Partner with SRE and engineering teams on cloud configuration, identity and access management, secrets management, vulnerability management, and infrastructure hardening.
- Help establish practical security standards that reduce risk without unnecessarily slowing product development.

## Qualifications

- Hands-on experience in application security, cloud security, infrastructure security, or security-focused site reliability engineering.
- Experience securing production systems in AWS, including familiarity with identity, networking, logging, data protection, and common cloud attack paths.
- Strong working knowledge of Terraform and infrastructure-as-code security practices.
- The ability to assess security across both infrastructure and application layers rather than treating them as separate environments.
- Experience reviewing application architecture or source code for security vulnerabilities and design weaknesses.
- Familiarity with common application, API, authentication, authorization, and data-security risks.
- Experience investigating complex technical events using application logs, cloud telemetry, audit trails, and other security data.
- Experience writing, tuning, or responding to SIEM detection rules.
- The ability to distinguish meaningful security signals from expected production behavior and noisy telemetry.
- Experience evaluating penetration-test findings, determining their practical risk, and partnering with engineers on remediation.
- Strong scripting or software-development skills for building security tools, automations, and integrations.
- Demonstrated proficiency with agentic software development.
- Sound judgment when balancing security risk, operational reliability, engineering effort, and product priorities.
- Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical risks and recommended actions to both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
- A collaborative approach that helps engineering teams build safer systems and make informed security decisions.

Bonus

- Partnership with IT Security in building and supporting each security domain
- Technical project management experience; ability to build a plan, clarify priorities, and both lead a team of collaborators and yourself to execute with urgency.
- Experience serving on a security or privacy incident-response team.
- Experience leading technical investigations during security or privacy incidents.
- SANS FOR509 training or certification.
- Purple teaming experience, including using offensive findings to improve defensive coverage.
- Experience owning or coordinating an external penetration-testing program.
- Experience with threat modeling, detection engineering, cloud forensics, or security automation.

## About Outset

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Outset is an AI-moderated research platform that combines conversational AI, behavioral intelligence, and emotional analysis to let companies run high-quality qualitative interviews and research studies at massive scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aaron Cannon (CEO) and Michael Hess

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Software Development / AI-Moderated Research & Insights Platform
- **Target customers**: Enterprise research teams (UX/Market/Consumer Insights), large corporations, and product teams (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "The future of innovation begins with listening to humans." Understanding people’s needs, motivations, and behaviors is the hardest and most important challenge for businesses; Outset makes that understanding effortless and scalable.

## Products & Services
- **AI-Moderated Interviews**: Conduct hundreds of AI-moderated interviews simultaneously in any language (video, voice, or text). The AI moderator dynamically probes participants based on audio and visual cues to uncover the "why" behind answers.
- **Instant Synthesis & Analysis**: Automatically generates highly relevant summaries, themes, impactful quotes, and customizable highlight reels based on research objectives, eliminating manual tagging and sifting.
- **Participant Recruitment**: Recruit hundreds of participants directly within the platform, or share an interview link with any external list.
- **Guide Set Up**: Effortlessly set up interview guides using AI, with qualitative/quantitative questions, advanced probing guidelines, and intelligent skipping logic.
- **Easy Stakeholder Shareout**: Get instant top-line reports, custom AI-generated reports, highlight reels, and ready-to-share PowerPoint decks to integrate research into decision-making.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of USD 8,500,000 (as of latest data). Total Funding of USD 51,250,000.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investors include **Radical Ventures** (Series B), **8VC** (Series A), with participation from 24 investors in earlier rounds. Trusted by enterprises like **Microsoft**, **Nestle**, **Uber**, **Hubspot**, and **Away**.
- **Growth Signals**: Massive headcount growth of **+563.6% year-over-year** (now 54 employees). Customer research coverage from 1.1B+ possible participants across 85+ countries, with over 500K studies run on the platform.

## Competitive Advantages
- Proprietary AI that bridges the "say-do gap" by probing in real-time based on audio and visual cues, not just recall.
- Multi-modal, multi-lingual scaling: enables research in any language, at any timezone, with continuous, multithreaded AI-moderated conversations.
- Enterprise-grade simplicity: designed for large research teams, removing scheduling friction and operations overhead so research happens in days, not months.
- End-to-end platform: from participant recruitment, guide setup, AI-moderation, to instant analysis and stakeholder shareout — a single integrated suite.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand leadership in replacing traditional, slow qualitative research (surveys, live interviews) with instant, scalable AI-moderated studies.
- Deepen enterprise penetration with top-tier clients (Microsoft, Nestle, Uber, HubSpot) by continuing to add advanced behavioral and emotional analysis features.
- Scale the platform’s capabilities to cover the entire research lifecycle more comprehensively, continuing to invest heavily in R&D.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: "Supportive founders and seasoned investors foster community, without startup toxicity." Team is described as "smart, kind, and driven teammates who know how to make work fun." Founders are very hands-on and accessible.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Primarily in-office at a "million-dollar office space" in SF with sweeping views and quick access to Market Street.
- **Notable perks**: Daily catered lunches and snacks with flexible dietary options, unlimited PTO, comprehensive health insurance (medical/dental/vision), unlimited budget for productivity tools, commuter benefits, allowance for continuing education, 401k with 6% match.
- **Engineering culture**: A strong technical focus (backend and frontend engineers) working on state-of-the-art AI and NLP. 9 active job postings across sales, engineering, marketing, design, and operations.
- **Who should apply**: People passionate about AI, user research, and building products that make human understanding scalable. The company values balance, growth, and high-impact work without "startup toxicity."

## Sources
1. [outset.ai](https://outset.ai/)
2. [outset.ai/careers](https://outset.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/outset-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outset-ai)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/outset](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/outset)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset)

## Other roles at Outset

- [Marketing Lead - EMEA](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-lead-emea-outset-london-m76tbfccg8am) — London, United Kingdom
- [Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/researcher-outset-san-francisco-agq2gg9angkn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Workplace Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-workplace-operations-outset-san-francisco-ss1by8ah9192) — San Francisco, CA
- [IT Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-automation-engineer-outset-san-francisco-51s41knafzqw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Account Director](https://feeny.ai/job/account-director-outset-san-francisco-yarryqq4qat7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Recruiting Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-coordinator-outset-san-francisco-ty8cq9r4xk9w) — San Francisco, CA
- [Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-outset-san-francisco-hv2qcx62mr95) — San Francisco, CA
- [Scaled Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/scaled-customer-success-manager-outset-san-francisco-drq1c7t7mptp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/research-manager-outset-san-francisco-9gv2eapx6xyq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Program Manager - Research Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-research-operations-outset-san-francisco-4h9qpq7d39j0) — San Francisco, CA