Vercel is a company that provides tools and cloud infrastructure for developers to build, scale, and secure web applications. They are seeking a Senior Product Security Engineer to drive critical product security initiatives, focusing on threat modeling, secure code review, and bug bounty program management, while ensuring security is embedded throughout the development lifecycle.
Responsibilities:
- Partner with engineering and product teams to perform threat modeling for new and existing features
- Identify potential risks early in the design phase and recommend security controls or design changes to mitigate threats
- Conduct secure code reviews and security assessments on products and services built with Next.js, Node.js, and our serverless backend
- Uncover code-level vulnerabilities, provide actionable remediation guidance to developers, and establish best practices for secure coding across the engineering team
- Oversee Vercel’s open-source security efforts
- Monitor and coordinate fixes for vulnerabilities in third-party open-source packages we use (as a consumer) and ensure the security of the open-source projects we maintain and publish (as a contributor/publisher, e.g. Next.js)
- Work with maintainers and the community on responsible disclosure and patching of security issues in open-source code
- Evaluate, select, and integrate security tools into our Software Development Life Cycle
- Drive the implementation of automated security checks – for example, using GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) and other static analysis, dependency scanning, and secret detection tools – directly in our CI/CD pipelines and GitHub workflows
- Own and expand Vercel’s bug bounty program
- Triage and validate incoming vulnerability reports from the security researcher community, ensure critical issues are promptly addressed, and coordinate cross-team efforts to remediate and learn from reported vulnerabilities
- Drive a company-wide upgrade to a more secure framework, implement a new authentication/authorization mechanism in collaboration with product teams, or roll out a security awareness program for engineers
- Work closely with customer success and product marketing on security-related initiatives that impact our users
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience in a Product Security or Product Security role (or related field), with a track record of securing web products and services
- Strong familiarity with JavaScript/TypeScript and Node.js runtime security
- Experience with modern web frameworks (ideally Next.js or React and Node-based frameworks) and understanding of their security considerations
- Demonstrated ability to perform threat modeling and architectural risk analysis for complex product
- Experience implementing or working with secure development lifecycle practices (secure design, code review, pentesting, etc.) is required
- Hands-on experience with product security tooling such as static product security testing (SAST), dynamic testing (DAST), dependency vulnerability scanners, and CI/CD pipeline security integration
- Knowledge of open-source security best practices
- Exposure to running or participating in a bug bounty program or vulnerability disclosure process
- Solid understanding of cloud architecture and serverless environments from a security perspective
- Proven ability to drive security initiatives and influence engineering teams to adopt best practices
- Prior software development experience beyond security (e.g. as a frontend or backend engineer)
- Hold relevant security certifications or recognitions (for example, OSCP, OSWE, CISSP, or notable bug bounty hall of fame entries)
- Experience with security policy-as-code or infrastructure as code security (for instance, using tools like Open Policy Agent, Terraform security checks, etc.)
- Have built or implemented security features in a product (such as authentication systems, encryption, secure CI/CD pipelines) or contributed to security community projects/tools
- Active participant in the security community (e.g., contributing to open source security projects, writing blog posts or research, attending or speaking at security conferences)