---
title: 'Security Lead at Sunset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/security-lead-sunset-new-york-6vgygry650b6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Security Lead at Sunset

- **Company:** Sunset
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sunset/15f4cae4-ff4d-45f1-804c-ca253f1a8dca

## Job description

## ABOUT SUNSET

At its core, Sunset was founded to help founders. We started by supporting startups through shutting down, but we have since expanded into unlocking a new revenue stream for all types of businesses.

In 2025, we had a unique insight: the data every company generates each day through collaboration, communication, and building is some of the most valuable training data in the world. Public and synthetic data can only get frontier models so far, so the next generation of model progress depends on real, proprietary data grounded in how actual businesses operate. We are a primary source of it, partnering directly with the frontier AI labs building what comes next.

## WHY JOIN SUNSET NOW

- We have scaled from $0 to a multi-eight-figure run rate in a matter of months
- We have raised from top-tier investors, including Floodgate, Afore, Ludlow, and Hustle Fund
- We are small enough that you will carry outsized responsibility and grow as quickly as the company does
- You will partner with and build for some of the fastest and most important companies in the world
- You will help build a massive, category-defining business from the ground floor

## THE ROLE

Sunset handles internal enterprise data from collaboration tools, documents, files, and business systems, then transforms it into de-identified datasets that remain useful. We also build software that can retrieve information, guide workflows, and take carefully bounded actions. Security is part of whether these products can exist, not a review added after they are built.

You will lead security across the company. The scope includes our products and cloud systems, the enterprise data we acquire and deliver, employee and contractor access, vendors, AI tool authority, incident readiness, and the human workflows through which consequential Dissolution work gets done. You will find the risks that could genuinely limit Sunset and turn them into technical, operational, and organizational controls that work in practice.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role. You will write code, review architecture, test technical and human systems, lead exercises and incidents, and create secure defaults other teams can operate. You own the company-wide security program, but the people who run each product, system, and operation remain responsible for implementing and following its controls. You are not a one-person IT, legal, compliance, or operations department.

## PROBLEMS YOU MIGHT OWN

## KEEP SENSITIVE DATA INSIDE EXPLICIT BOUNDARIES

Trace how customer data, credentials, derived artifacts, and delivery outputs move through SaaS applications, workers, data pipelines, review tools, logs, storage, and third parties. Build controls that make tenant isolation, access, retention, deletion, quarantine, and delivery decisions enforceable and auditable rather than dependent on convention.

GIVE PEOPLE AND AI SYSTEMS ONLY THE AUTHORITY THEY NEED

Design identity, authorization, and credential systems for employees, contractors, customers, services, and AI-assisted workflows. You might build just-in-time access, scoped tool contracts, approval boundaries, safe execution environments, or protections against prompt injection, confused-deputy behavior, and data exfiltration.

SECURE HOW THE COMPANY AND ITS PEOPLE OPERATE

Design security into employee onboarding and offboarding, devices, accounts, contractors, vendors, support access, and sensitive human workflows. On the Dissolution side, that includes identity verification, approval boundaries, segregation of duties, document and credential handling, consequential actions, exception paths, and an audit trail that shows who did what and why.

## MAKE THE SECURE PATH THE EASIEST PATH

Build paved roads that catch important problems early without creating a security queue. This could include high-signal code and architecture review, secrets and sensitive-data detection, reusable authorization patterns, dependency and cloud controls, release checks, incident tooling, or automated evidence that serves both engineers and customer trust.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Establish Sunset's company-wide security program, current attack surface, highest-consequence risks, and prioritized roadmap
- Threat-model product, data, AI, cloud, workforce, vendor, delivery, and human operational workflows, then stay involved through implementation and verification
- Build and improve controls for identity, authorization, tenancy, sensitive data, credentials, logging, secure execution, and customer delivery
- Define and verify workforce-security requirements for accounts, endpoints, onboarding, offboarding, contractors, vendors, training, and access reviews
- Work with Dissolution Operations to secure identity checks, approvals, segregation of duties, documents, money or asset-related actions, exceptions, and evidence of human decisions
- Find vulnerabilities through code review, architecture review, testing, production evidence, and attacker-minded investigation
- Lead the security side of incidents and exercises, including containment, recovery, learning, and durable remediation
- Create secure defaults, tooling, and review triggers that let product, machine learning, data, and platform teams move independently
- Maintain the security control framework and evidence for customer reviews and SOC 2, while keeping each control with an accountable operating owner
- Work with leadership on risk acceptance and with legal, compliance, and privacy partners on decisions outside the engineering function
- Use AI tools deeply for security analysis and engineering while treating generated findings, code, and conclusions as evidence to verify

## WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

- Sunset's most consequential security risks are visible, owned, and being reduced in a deliberate order
- At least one high-risk technical or human-operational boundary is materially safer because of a control you designed, implemented with its owner, and verified
- Engineers adopt reusable security capabilities that reduce dependence on case-by-case review
- Employees, contractors, and operational teams have clear access, approval, escalation, and evidence requirements for consequential work
- Access, vulnerabilities, incidents, sensitive-data handling, vendor risk, and control evidence become easier to understand and act on
- Product and AI capabilities expand within explicit authority, isolation, monitoring, and recovery boundaries
- Customer trust evidence becomes faster to produce because it reflects real, current controls

## YOU MIGHT THRIVE HERE IF

- You have at least three years of professional security or software engineering experience, including hands-on work securing production systems
- You are a strong software engineer with security as a core specialty, and you are comfortable building controls rather than only recommending them
- You have worked in a startup and can prioritize a few consequential risks across a much larger set of possible improvements
- You have owned security outcomes across several of product engineering, infrastructure, workforce, vendors, compliance, or business operations
- You can reason deeply about application security, identity and authorization, multi-tenant systems, cloud infrastructure, sensitive data, secrets, and incident response
- You think like both a builder and an attacker and can explain the actual abuse path, affected asset, likely impact, and useful mitigation
- You create low-friction defaults and clear decision boundaries instead of making Security the approval step for routine work
- You can secure human workflows with approvals, separation of duties, training, evidence, and monitoring without pretending every risk has a software-only solution
- You can communicate risk honestly to engineers, executives, customers, and auditors without using certainty you do not have
- You use modern AI engineering tools fluently and understand their authority, data, dependency, prompt-injection, and verification risks

THIS ROLE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU IF

- You want a compliance-only role centered on collecting evidence and administering frameworks
- You prefer producing findings or policies to implementing and verifying durable controls
- You treat every possible vulnerability as equally urgent or use Security as an unconditional veto without explaining the tradeoff
- You want a narrow specialty with established teams to own every adjacent system and decision
- You do not want AI tools to be part of your daily security and engineering workflow

## BONUS

- Experience securing data-intensive, privacy-sensitive, or multi-tenant SaaS products
- Experience with information extraction, de-identification, data pipelines, secure delivery, or privacy-preserving systems
- Experience securing AI agents, tool-using systems, retrieval, model workflows, or MCP-style integrations
- Experience building least-privilege, just-in-time access, policy enforcement, secrets detection, data-loss prevention, or audit systems
- Experience with SOC 2, customer security reviews, vulnerability management, incident response, penetration testing, or security partners
- Experience as an early security hire who created leverage without centralizing all security work
- Experience securing operational, financial, legal, support, or other consequential human workflows

## About Sunset

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sunset is the first purpose-built platform that handles all legal, tax, and operational work to wind down venture-backed startups cleanly and quickly.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed & Venture funded)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Brendan Mahony (Founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Startup wind-downs / Dissolution services (legal, tax, and operational)
- **Target Customers**: B2B; founders and investors of venture-backed startups that are shutting down
- **Mission/Purpose**: To give founders the freedom to find what's next by removing the burden of the shutdown process.

## Products & Services
- **End-to-End Wind-Down Platform**: A fully managed service combining a purpose-built software platform with a dedicated team (attorneys, CPAs, Client Success leads) to handle legal, tax, and operational tasks. This includes state withdrawals, asset monetization (selling, auctioning, licensing IP), investor distributions (building waterfalls, collecting banking info, executing capital redistribution), and filing all final federal and state tax returns. [sunsethq.com](https://sunsethq.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric (Funding)**: **$7.9M** total funding across two rounds:
    - Pre-Seed (Jan 2024): **$1.5M**
    - Venture Round (May 2025): **$6.4M** [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunsethq)
- **Key Metric (Scale)**: Has helped **over 175+** venture-backed startups shut down; has redistributed **hundreds of millions of dollars** back to investors. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/sunset-0), [sunsethq.com](https://sunsethq.com/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by Y Combinator and some of the world’s best entrepreneurs and investors. [sunsethq.com](https://sunsethq.com/about)
- **Growth Signals**: 11 employees with +13.9% YoY headcount growth; active job postings for Data Engineer, ML Engineer, and Client Success Manager. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunsethq)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Category-Defining Platform**: Sunset is the first company to build a dedicated, integrated platform (software + expert team) specifically for startup wind-downs, solving a problem that was previously handled ad-hoc by generalist lawyers and accountants.
- **End-to-End, Fully Managed Service**: They handle every aspect of the dissolution—legal, tax, asset monetization, and capital distribution—in one place with one fee, saving founders months of time and significant personal cost.
- **Deep Founder Empathy**: Founded by Brendan Mahony after his own painful, 7-month dissolution experience. This mission-driven origin creates a strong, empathetic culture focused on helping founders during a difficult time. [sunsethq.com](https://sunsethq.com/about)
- **Strong Traction with Top-Tier Clients**: Having served over 175 venture-backed startups and redistributed hundreds of millions to investors, they have built significant credibility and trust in the startup ecosystem.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the Platform**: Investing in engineering (Data Engineer, ML Engineer roles) to further automate and streamline the wind-down process.
- **Deepening Service Offerings**: Continuing to refine the legal, tax, and asset monetization workflows to ensure the fastest, most efficient, and highest-value return for investors.
- **Becoming the Standard**: Establishing Sunset as the default, go-to service for any venture-backed startup facing a shutdown, thereby creating a standard for an industry that previously had none.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Mission**: Employees directly help founders through one of the most difficult moments of their careers, providing closure and allowing them to move on. The work is deeply meaningful and has a tangible, positive impact on people’s lives.
- **Strong Values-Driven Culture**: Core values include "Carry each other," "Be the painkiller," "Make it world-class," "Swing big, learn fast," and "Keep your promises," fostering a supportive, empathetic, and high-performance environment. [sunsethq.com](https://sunsethq.com/careers)
- **Growth Stage Company**: As a small but growing team (11 people), employees have outsized impact and ownership. The company is generating revenue and has raised significant funding, indicating a strong trajectory.
- **Work Environment**: On-site in New York City with an open-door policy, open office floor plan, and an engineering team that utilizes pair programming. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/sunset-0)
- **Benefits**: Offers company equity, generous PTO (unlimited policy), paid holidays, and health/vision/dental insurance. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/sunset-0)
- **Tech Stack**: Modern and robust, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby on Rails, React, Remix, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Azure. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/sunset-0)

## Sources
1. [sunsethq.com](https://sunsethq.com/)
2. [sunsethq.com/careers](https://sunsethq.com/careers)
3. [sunsethq.com/about](https://sunsethq.com/about)
4. [linkedin.com/company/sunsethq](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunsethq)
5. [builtin.com/company/sunset-0](https://builtin.com/company/sunset-0)

## Other roles at Sunset

- [Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-sunset-new-york-tjxkj0jzd1ts) — New York, NY
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-sunset-new-york-4hpwv6ybfsk5) — New York, NY
- [Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-sunset-new-york-e0vrwgg97akb) — New York, NY
- [Design Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/design-engineer-sunset-new-york-nj7k67c09en7) — New York, NY
- [Data Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/data-scientist-sunset-new-york-9rqm51n50pf9) — New York, NY
- [AI Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-product-engineer-sunset-new-york-n8f4zqtcafxf) — New York, NY
- [Full-Stack Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-product-engineer-sunset-new-york-dj4a73d25w0d) — New York, NY
- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-sunset-new-york-r3wr42whx92v) — New York, NY
- [Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketer-sunset-new-york-rs2h7qxaev58) — New York, NY
- [Business Development Representative, Data Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-data-partnerships-sunset-new-york-jhpb75y5za0p) — New York, NY