---
title: 'Security Engineer Lead at People Culture Talent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-lead-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-xar29hafrz79'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Security Engineer Lead at People Culture Talent

- **Company:** People Culture Talent
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent/7d7a3132-b28b-4494-805f-2258eb1b010c

## Job description

Note: We are recruiting on behalf of our valued client. This opportunity is for a position with their organization, not with People Culture Talent. We're excited to help connect talented professionals with this exceptional team!

## The Role

This is a Senior Security Lead role designed to lead the strategy and hands-on implementation of systems that protect the integrity of Arena Intelligence, a multi-million user AI platform, shaping the future of how the world measures artificial intelligence. You’ll work across product, infrastructure, and data pipelines to proactively identify risks, embed security into core features, and build scalable defenses against abuse, fraud, and adversarial behavior. This is a builder role - you’ll not only set technical direction but also write the code, build the tools, and design the frameworks that make security and trust part of this product’s DNA.

## Responsibilities

- Own the product security vision, ensuring security and trust are core to every stage of the product lifecycle.
- Design and implement platform-wide security features, including Sybil resistance, bot detection, reputation systems, and anti-abuse primitives.
- Lead threat modeling and security architecture reviews for new and existing product features.
- Collaborate with infrastructure and product engineering to design secure APIs, data flows, and identity systems that scale.
- Improve developer velocity by creating secure-by-default frameworks and tooling for internal teams.
- Partner with incident response to quickly assess, contain, and remediate security events, and lead deep postmortems to improve defenses.
- Stay ahead of the curve by monitoring emerging attack techniques and applying cutting-edge security research to our platform.
- Mentor engineers across the company on secure coding practices, architecture trade-offs, and operational security.

## Qualifications

- 8+ years of experience in software engineering or security engineering, including staff-level scope in securing large-scale, user-facing platforms.
- Proven track record designing and implementing systems to detect, mitigate, and prevent adversarial behavior (bots, Sybil attacks, automated abuse).
- Strong experience with threat modeling, secure architecture design, and risk assessment.
- Hands-on experience building security features into production systems at scale (millions of DAU / billions of requests).
- Proficiency in backend development (Node.js, TypeScript, Python, or Go) and willingness to work across the stack when needed.
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems security, identity, and authentication mechanisms.
- Excellent communication skills, able to build alignment across engineering, product, and leadership teams.

Bonus Points

- Experience in adversarial ML, trust & safety systems, or securing voting/reputation platforms.
- Familiarity with advanced detection methods, user fingerprinting, or behavioral analytics.
- Contributions to open-source security tools or research.
- Background in securing real-time, interactive platforms at scale.
- Built real-time detection systems and post-processing pipelines to identify attacks on large scale systems

## Compensation Band

Their openings span more than one career level. The starting salary for this role is $200k and could range up to $400k USD, plus equity. The provided salary depends on many factors, such as work experience and transferable skills, business needs and impact, and market demands.

## Benefits

- Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
- The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team.
- A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact.
- Visa sponsorship available.

About Our Client: Arena Intelligence is redefining what "better" means in AI. Built by researchers from UC Berkeley's SkyLab and backed by Felicis, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and the University of California, this open evaluation platform has become the definitive source for understanding how AI models actually perform in the real world. With over a million daily users and the trust of every major AI lab — including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — their crowdsourced benchmarks and human preference data power the decisions shaping the future of artificial intelligence. Their leaderboards aren't just influential; they're the industry standard. Behind the platform is a team of researchers, engineers, and builders from UC Berkeley, Google, Stanford, DeepMind, and beyond — people who seek truth, move fast, and care deeply about craftsmanship and impact. They're building a company where deep expertise meets curiosity, and where the work genuinely matters.

## About People Culture Talent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: People Culture Talent (PCT) partners with venture-backed startups to build exceptional teams through embedded talent search, people operations, and culture‑building services.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Tianna Johnson and Caitlin Cooke

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Human Resources / Talent & People Operations
- **Target customers**: Venture‑backed technology startups at all stages (seed to pre‑IPO), venture capital firms, and high‑growth companies.
- **Mission**: “To build better founders and companies by creating the people, culture, and talent foundations that generational companies are made of.”

## Products & Services
PCT offers a full suite of services organized around three pillars:
- **Talent** – Retained and embedded executive search, recruiting process design, talent strategy, ATS implementation (Ashby partner), candidate experience design, and recruiting metrics.
- **Culture** – Values definition and operationalization, workplace culture development, mission/vision/framework creation, retreat/offsite planning, and employer branding.
- **People** – Organizational design & headcount planning, performance management systems, leveling & career architecture, total rewards, benefits strategy, onboarding/offboarding, payroll & HRIS implementation, manager enablement, and fractional services (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private, no disclosed funding).
- **Key Metric**: 220 total employees (as of early 2025); companies they have scaled average 300% annual growth.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Not an investment‑backed firm; clients and partners include Andreessen Horowitz (where co‑founder Caitlin Cooke advised portfolio companies), Ashby (premier implementation partner), Rippling, Lattice, Leapsome, Gem, Juicebox.
- **Growth Signals**: 5 offices globally (San Francisco, plus remote hubs across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Philippines). Currently hiring engineers (Founding Engineer, Product Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer) indicating a push to build internal platform tools. Have scaled a single client from 10 to 800 team members.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Embedded operating model** – PCT works inside the client’s tools (Slack, ATS, etc.), providing full transparency and real‑time collaboration, unlike traditional agencies.
- **Boutique by design** – The firm intentionally stays small and flat, with senior operators directly managing every engagement. No handoffs to junior consultants.
- **Proven pattern recognition** – Founders have personally scaled engineering and talent teams at Lyft (400→7,000 for IPO), GitHub (through Microsoft acquisition), Notion (20→600, $500M→$10B valuation), and ID.me (100→1,500).
- **Full‑lifecycle offering** – Covers everything from first hire to pre‑IPO people infrastructure, making it a one‑stop partner for founders.

## Strategic Focus
- Deepen the “platform” side of the business by building internal software and systems (ATS implementations, people analytics, automation).
- Expand fractional services across more functions (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).
- Maintain a people‑first, high‑trust culture that mirrors what they advise clients to build.
- Continue serving the venture‑backed ecosystem, from early‑stage founders to later‑stage transformations.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a team of seasoned operators who are “unapologetically embedded” and committed to honest counsel. Values include accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- **Work style**: Hybrid environment with a mix of remote and on‑site work. Offices in San Francisco and remote hubs across multiple countries. Some roles are fully remote, others require in‑office presence (SF).
- **Team**: Small (220 employees) but expanding; direct access to founders and partners. Engineers and non‑engineering roles alike work on high‑impact projects for top VC‑backed startups.
- **Perks**: Not publicly detailed; typical benefits for a Bay Area talent firm likely include competitive compensation, flexibility, and the opportunity to shape the people‑tech ecosystem.

## Sources
1. [People.Culture.Talent. – Homepage](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/)
2. [Who We Are – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/who-we-are)
3. [What We Do – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/what-we-do)
4. [Built In – People Culture Talent Profile](https://builtin.com/company/people-culture-talent)
5. [People Culture Talent – Careers Page (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent)

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