Security Software Engineer Jobs in California
Security Software Engineer jobs in California represent one of the most active markets in the country, concentrated in cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, defense contracting, and enterprise software across seniority levels from entry-level associate engineer through principal and staff. The largest hiring hubs are the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles, where anchors like Google, Northrop Grumman, and Palo Alto Networks maintain significant engineering presence. The most in-demand specialties in California listings include cloud security, application security, and zero-trust architecture. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Showing 5 of 103+ Security Software Engineer jobs
Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.
At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.
A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.
As a Principal Security Software Engineer on the Production IAM team, you will set the technical direction for how identity and access work across Roblox's production infrastructure, from the mTLS-based identity that services use to authenticate to one another, to the privileged access controls that govern how engineers reach production. The team is accountable for Roblox's machine and workload identity platform, its centralized authorization engine, its production access management platform, production PKI and certificate lifecycle, and just-in-time privileged access for engineers. As an individual contributor in Production IAM, you will define multi-year strategy, drive alignment across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and personally build the hardest parts of these systems. As AI agents become first-class actors in production, you will also help pioneer how they get identity, prove who they are, and receive safely-scoped access.
You will
- Lead the architecture for production identity and access. Define and evolve the end-to-end design for machine, workload, human, and AI-agent identity across our hybrid on-prem and cloud fleet, making secure access invisible when it can be and intuitive when it needs attention.
- Drive mTLS and workload identity to full production enforcement. Lead the technical strategy for our SPIFFE/SPIRE-based identity platform, service-mesh integration, managed service accounts, and certificate issuance, storage, and rotation.
- Advance just-in-time, least-privilege access for engineers. Architect just-in-time, least-privilege, and break-glass access to production, replacing static, long-lived credentials with short-lived, auditable access that stays reliable even during dependency or identity-provider outages.
- Evolve the centralized authorization engine and a secure golden path. Mature our centralized authorization engine and the access-control models behind it (RBAC/ABAC and risk-based access) so decisions are consistent, fine-grained, and testable.
- Pioneer identity and access for AI agents. Define how agents obtain credentials, receive scoped permissions, and have their sessions managed across their lifecycle, setting the patterns for agentic identity at Roblox..
- Lead across the org and raise the bar. Author RFCs and multi-year roadmaps, align stakeholders across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and raise the technical bar through design review, on-call ownership, and hiring.
You have
- 8+ years of relevant professional experience building scalable, distributed backend systems, with a track record of driving architecture end to end.
- Deep expertise in identity and access management — authentication, authorization, and access-control models such as RBAC, ABAC, or risk-based access control.
- Hands-on experience with several of: PKI and certificate/key lifecycle management, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE or comparable workload-identity systems, service mesh, secret management (e.g., Vault), and privileged access management (PAM).
- Proficiency in at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, Java, C++, Python, or C# .NET, and a habit of building systems rather than only configuring vendor tools.
- Experience leading the technical work of other engineers — setting direction across teams, writing influential design docs, and mentoring senior talent.
- AI fluency: you use AI tools in your daily workflow, understand LLM capabilities and limitations, and can reason about what it means to give an AI agent an identity and permissions.
- A Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.
You are
- A systems thinker. You reason about failure modes, blast radius, and reliability, and you design access that stays secure and available even when dependencies fail.
- Security-minded and pragmatic. You are passionate about least privilege and zero trust, but you optimize for the Builder experience and adoption, not controls for their own sake.
- A force multiplier. You make the engineers and teams around you better through mentorship, clear writing, and high-quality technical leadership.
- A strong communicator. You translate deep technical tradeoffs for both engineers and executives, and you build alignment across organizational boundaries.
- Bar-raising and hands-on. You still love to build, and you set the standard for engineering quality on the hardest problems.
For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).
Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.
For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.
Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.
At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.
A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.
As a Principal Security Software Engineer on the Production IAM team, you will set the technical direction for how identity and access work across Roblox's production infrastructure, from the mTLS-based identity that services use to authenticate to one another, to the privileged access controls that govern how engineers reach production. The team is accountable for Roblox's machine and workload identity platform, its centralized authorization engine, its production access management platform, production PKI and certificate lifecycle, and just-in-time privileged access for engineers. As an individual contributor in Production IAM, you will define multi-year strategy, drive alignment across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and personally build the hardest parts of these systems. As AI agents become first-class actors in production, you will also help pioneer how they get identity, prove who they are, and receive safely-scoped access.
You will
- Lead the architecture for production identity and access. Define and evolve the end-to-end design for machine, workload, human, and AI-agent identity across our hybrid on-prem and cloud fleet, making secure access invisible when it can be and intuitive when it needs attention.
- Drive mTLS and workload identity to full production enforcement. Lead the technical strategy for our SPIFFE/SPIRE-based identity platform, service-mesh integration, managed service accounts, and certificate issuance, storage, and rotation.
- Advance just-in-time, least-privilege access for engineers. Architect just-in-time, least-privilege, and break-glass access to production, replacing static, long-lived credentials with short-lived, auditable access that stays reliable even during dependency or identity-provider outages.
- Evolve the centralized authorization engine and a secure golden path. Mature our centralized authorization engine and the access-control models behind it (RBAC/ABAC and risk-based access) so decisions are consistent, fine-grained, and testable.
- Pioneer identity and access for AI agents. Define how agents obtain credentials, receive scoped permissions, and have their sessions managed across their lifecycle, setting the patterns for agentic identity at Roblox..
- Lead across the org and raise the bar. Author RFCs and multi-year roadmaps, align stakeholders across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and raise the technical bar through design review, on-call ownership, and hiring.
You have
- 8+ years of relevant professional experience building scalable, distributed backend systems, with a track record of driving architecture end to end.
- Deep expertise in identity and access management — authentication, authorization, and access-control models such as RBAC, ABAC, or risk-based access control.
- Hands-on experience with several of: PKI and certificate/key lifecycle management, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE or comparable workload-identity systems, service mesh, secret management (e.g., Vault), and privileged access management (PAM).
- Proficiency in at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, Java, C++, Python, or C# .NET, and a habit of building systems rather than only configuring vendor tools.
- Experience leading the technical work of other engineers — setting direction across teams, writing influential design docs, and mentoring senior talent.
- AI fluency: you use AI tools in your daily workflow, understand LLM capabilities and limitations, and can reason about what it means to give an AI agent an identity and permissions.
- A Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.
You are
- A systems thinker. You reason about failure modes, blast radius, and reliability, and you design access that stays secure and available even when dependencies fail.
- Security-minded and pragmatic. You are passionate about least privilege and zero trust, but you optimize for the Builder experience and adoption, not controls for their own sake.
- A force multiplier. You make the engineers and teams around you better through mentorship, clear writing, and high-quality technical leadership.
- A strong communicator. You translate deep technical tradeoffs for both engineers and executives, and you build alignment across organizational boundaries.
- Bar-raising and hands-on. You still love to build, and you set the standard for engineering quality on the hardest problems.
For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).
Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.
For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.
See All 103+ Security Software Engineer Jobs in California
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Find JobsSecurity Software Engineer Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Security Software Engineer Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Palo Alto Networks11
- Apple9
- Google7
- Roblox7
- Anthropic4
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software37
- Electronics & Hardware12
- Agriculture & Farming7
- Science & Research6
- Retail2
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in security software engineer jobs across California.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, cybersecurity, or a closely related engineering field
- Hands-on experience with secure software development lifecycle and threat modeling practices
- Proficiency in at least one compiled or scripting language such as Python, Go, C, or Java
- Familiarity with cloud security frameworks across AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform
- Industry certification such as CISSP, CEH, or OSCP recognized by California defense and enterprise employers
- Experience with penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, or static and dynamic code analysis tools
Security Software Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a security software engineer in California?
Most California security software engineers start with a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or cybersecurity, then build toward industry certifications such as CISSP, CEH, or CompTIA Security+, which California employers in defense, finance, and cloud consistently require. California has no state-issued license specific to this role, so hiring decisions hinge on demonstrated skills, certifications, and portfolio work. Contributing to open-source security projects or completing a cybersecurity bootcamp recognized by California employers can accelerate entry.
How much do security software engineers make in California?
Security software engineers in California earn a median of about $174,410 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $105,060 for the lowest 10% to over $272,670 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire security software engineers in California?
Employers hiring security software engineers in California right now include Palo Alto Networks, Apple, and Google, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of August 2026. California's density of defense contractors, cloud platform companies, and regulated financial institutions means steady demand across both commercial and government-adjacent sectors.
Which California cities have the most security software engineer jobs?
San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Clara have the most security software engineer openings in California. The Bay Area dominates due to its concentration of cloud, enterprise software, and cybersecurity-native companies, while San Diego draws heavily from defense contractors and biotech firms requiring embedded or product security engineers, and Los Angeles reflects demand from entertainment technology, fintech, and aerospace.
Are there remote security software engineer jobs in California?
Yes, and more than most engineering disciplines, because security software work is largely code- and tooling-based rather than tied to physical infrastructure. About 35% of security software engineer openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of August 2026, reflecting strong employer flexibility across the state. Application security and cloud security roles tend to be the most remote-accessible, while roles involving classified systems or on-site red team operations require in-person presence.
How can I get hired as a security software engineer in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is a junior or associate security engineer role in California, often reached through university new-grad programs at companies like Google, Salesforce, or Palo Alto Networks, or through defense contractor internship pipelines with firms like Northrop Grumman and Leidos that operate large California campuses. Candidates coming from adjacent roles such as software developer, IT systems administrator, or QA engineer can transition by earning a CompTIA Security+ or CEH certification and building a portfolio of security-focused projects. California community colleges and Cal State programs also feed directly into regional employer pipelines.
Where can I find and apply to security software engineer jobs in California?
You can find and apply to security software engineer jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings updated regularly. Find roles that match your experience and location, then apply directly to each opening.
See All 103+ Security Software Engineer Jobs in California
Find roles in California that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
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