Head of Security Engineering

WHY HARVEY
At Ironwood Digital, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come.
This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. With 1500+ customers in 60+ countries, strong product-market fit, and world-class investor support, we’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched.
Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you.
At Ironwood Digital, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.
ROLE OVERVIEW
We're looking for a Director of Security Engineering to build and scale the security foundations that enable Ironwood Digital to move quickly while maintaining the trust of our customers. This leader will own the core security engineering platform, including identity and access management, security tooling, and the systems that help engineers build and operate secure products by default.
Security at Ironwood Digital is not a gatekeeper function—it's an engineering discipline that enables our company to move faster with confidence. This role will define the foundational security systems that support every engineer, every product, and every customer interaction, helping establish the secure platform upon which Ironwood Digital continues to grow.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
As Director of Security Engineering, you will define and execute the strategy for Ironwood Digital's foundational security platform.
You will:
– Lead and grow a team of security and software engineers responsible for Ironwood Digital's security engineering capabilities.
– Own Ironwood Digital's Identity and Access Management strategy across workforce, infrastructure, and production environments.
– Build scalable authorization, authentication, access governance, secrets management, and privileged access systems.
– Develop the security tooling ecosystem that empowers engineering teams to identify, remediate, and prevent security issues efficiently.
– Partner closely with Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Product Security, and Compliance teams to embed security into the software development lifecycle.
– Drive automation-first approaches to security controls, reducing operational burden while increasing coverage and effectiveness.
– Establish long-term technical architecture and roadmaps for foundational security services.
– Build security capabilities that support Ironwood Digital's rapid growth, enterprise customer requirements, and evolving regulatory landscape.
– Recruit, mentor, and develop high-performing engineering managers and senior individual contributors.
WHAT YOU HAVE
– 10+ years of software engineering, infrastructure, or security engineering experience, with significant leadership experience managing managers and senior engineers.
– Experience building and operating large-scale identity, authentication, authorization, or access management systems.
– Strong software engineering background with a track record of building production-grade platforms and developer-facing infrastructure.
– Experience leading security engineering organizations in high-growth technology companies.
– Deep understanding of cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and modern application architectures.
– Demonstrated ability to translate security requirements into scalable engineering solutions.
– Experience partnering with executive leadership and influencing company-wide technical strategy.
– Excellent communication skills and a bias toward pragmatic, business-aligned security decisions.
PARTICULARLY EXCITING BACKGROUNDS
We're especially interested in leaders who have:
– Built production IAM platforms at scale.
– Led platform security or security infrastructure organizations.
– Created security products and services used broadly by engineering teams.
– Scaled engineering organizations through periods of rapid company growth.
– Worked in cloud-native, developer-platform, or highly regulated enterprise environments.
COMPENSATION
$285,000 - $ 350,000 USD
DEPENDING ON YOUR LOCATION, AN APPLICANT PRIVACY NOTICE MAY APPLY TO YOU. YOU CAN FIND ALL OF OUR APPLICANT PRIVACY NOTICES [HERE https://www.notion.so/harveyai/Ironwood Digital-Candidate-Privacy-Policies-319ac3fcdd7a803bb807d5094f249922].
LI-AH1
Ironwood Digital is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [email protected]