
Product Security Engineer at Base Power Company (Austin, TX)
Base Power Company· Austin, TX·
Role details
Base Power Company at a glance
Base Power installs home batteries and sells below-market energy in Texas, earning its margin from the grid instead of your bill.
Base Power is a next-generation power company that installs whole-home backup batteries and sells fixed-rate, below-market electricity to homeowners, primarily in Texas. It coordinates its fleet of distributed batteries as a single grid asset, earning revenue from wholesale energy markets so it can keep customer rates low.
$1.3B raised · latest: Series C · $1B · October 2025 · backed by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Job description
About Base
Base is America’s next-generation power company. We’re rebuilding the foundation of modern civilization–electricity–by deploying a vast network of distributed batteries that is transforming today’s fragile, centralized grid into a resilient and abundant system. We are engineers, operators, and creatives solving some of the most complex, interdisciplinary challenges of our time.
About the Role
Base's batteries are internet-connected industrial control systems in miniature. Installed across thousands of homes, together they operate as a distributed power plant. The attack surface runs from silicon to cloud. You'll own the end-to-end security of the fleet and how it interacts with the world. The fleet is live today and scaling quickly, so the exposure is real and compounds with every install. This is a generalist role: you'll go wherever the risk is highest, across software, firmware, hardware, and cloud. You'll dive into unfamiliar systems, bottom out assumptions, and prove what's actually true.
What You'll Do
- Own threat modeling and design review across the product, from gateway SoCs and boot chains through embedded firmware, fleet transport, command authority, and cloud services
- Turn threat models into prioritized security objectives and drive their implementation
- Design and build the security foundations under the fleet: device identity and factory provisioning, code and OTA signing, service authentication, and certificate lifecycle across devices that outlive the systems issuing them
- Analyze vulnerability reports and internal findings: reproduce them, run variant analysis, determine exploitability and design impact, and set the direction of the fix
- Test our product the way an attacker would, at whichever layer matters, then turn findings into requirements and standards changes
- Author security engineering standards and reference patterns, build the tooling that makes review and enforcement repeatable
- Produce the technical assessments Base's position rests on in utility, interconnection, and certification engagements where device security is in scope
What You'll Bring
- Experience securing production systems that span multiple trust boundaries
- A track record of shipping security work end-to-end and collaborating across teams to make it stick
- The judgment to distinguish plausible attacks from consequential ones and prioritize accordingly
- The ability to get productive quickly in unfamiliar systems, bottom out assumptions, and support conclusions with evidence
- Enough software engineering depth to read, test, and change the systems you review, regardless of language or tech-stack
- Clear communication and writing skills - ability to rally other teams
About the Team
Base's Product Security team owns the security of a fleet that's already live in thousands of homes and scaling fast, from the SoCs and boot chains inside each battery to the cloud services commanding them. The team is small and generalist by design. Rather than splitting into narrow specialties, its engineers go wherever the risk is highest, moving fluidly across firmware, hardware, software, and cloud. That range matters because Cortex is shipping today with almost no security review and years of accumulated debt across gen1 and gen3. The team's job is equal parts establishing what's actually true about the fleet's current state and building the lasting foundations, like device identity, signing, and certificate lifecycle, that let it keep scaling safely.
Please note: Base is a startup, which means priorities shift and evolve quickly. Your role may expand or change based on the needs of the business at any given time, so the responsibilities listed may not be exhaustive.
Our Values
- First Principles Thinking: Question assumptions. Principles > rules.
- Operate at Base Pace: Focus on what matters, act quickly, and learn by doing.
- Give & Get Feedback: Be direct, be humble, and maintain a growth mindset.
- Everyone’s an Owner: Follow through on commitments and own results.
- Strong Opinions, Loosely Held: Drive clarity and make calls with imperfect information.
- Committed to the Mission: Rebuilding the grid is a big challenge. We work hard because we care deeply about the impact we’re creating. We work in-person. It’s not a 9-to-5. We are all-in.
- Fun & Optimism Coexist with Grit: Collaboration and celebration coincide with the intensity of building real things.
Do the best work of your life at Base.
Why work at Base Power Company
- Culture: Described as "intense, fast-paced, and deeply mission-driven." The company demands high output, ownership, and a bias toward action. It's explicitly stated as "not for everyone, and that's by design." This is a high-ownership, low-ambiguity environment.
- Work Model: On-site at Base HQ in Austin, Texas. Proximity to the product and team is central to how they move fast. "Do I need to be based in Texas? Yes."
- Hiring Speed: Fast process — aim for 1st conversation to offer in ~2 weeks.
- Interview Process: 3-4 hour on-site including technical assessments and behavioral/team conversations. Focus on "how [you] approach problems, communicate tradeoffs, and collaborate."
- Non-traditional backgrounds: Explicitly welcome: "We care about what you've built and how you think, not the logos on your resume. Some of our best people came from non-traditional paths."
- Engineering Culture: Heavy focus on hardware + software + field operations. Talent sources heavily from Tesla, Anduril, SpaceX — firms known for hardcore engineering and manufacturing excellence. Roles span hardware engineering, firmware, software, manufacturing, field installation/service, operations, growth, and design.
- Team Composition: ~29% of employees are in technical roles; ~15% in operations; significant representation of trades workers (11).
- Notable Perks: Opportunity to work on physical infrastructure deployed at scale; chance to contribute meaningfully to grid modernization and American energy resilience.