Security Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
California is one of the most active states for security engineer visa sponsorship, driven by Silicon Valley's concentration of technology companies, cybersecurity firms, and cloud infrastructure providers. Major employers including Google, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Apple regularly sponsor H-1B visa and other work visas for qualified security engineers across San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles.
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FAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute working to ensure advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research, advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions, and foster a coordinated global response. We’re structured to support that work from early research through real-world adoption: Independent by design. We can pursue what's most impactful based on our theory of change and share what we find publicly. A portfolio approach. Rather than focus on one single direction, we run diverse bets across the safety stack. We take promising ideas from initial experiments to deployment, informed by red-team partnerships with frontier labs and governments. Serious infrastructure for ambitious research. A dedicated engineering team runs our compute cluster and experiment-scaling stack, so researchers spend their time on research instead of on infra. Setting the standard. Our events convene key decision makers; our red-team works with frontier developers and governments; and our communications inform the public. Together, this drives adoption and sets the new standard in safety. Since our founding in July 2022, we've grown to 50+ staff, published 40+ academic papers, and convened leading AI safety events. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML including a Best Paper Honorable Mention in 2026, and ICLR, and features in the Financial Times, Nature News, Wired Magazine and MIT Technology Review. We conduct pre-deployment testing on behalf of frontier developers such as OpenAI and independent evaluations for governments including the EU AI Office and publish the AI Security Leaderboard based on our red-teaming expertise. We help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running FAR.Labs, an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40+ members; and supporting the community through targeted grants to technical researchers.
The Role
We are hiring an IT & Security Manager to keep FAR.AI running reliably and securely as we grow. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks about internal systems the way a security-minded engineer does: curious about what an attacker would actually go after, and more interested in systems that hold up under pressure than in systems that pass an audit. You will report to the COO and work closely with our Head of Research Acceleration, who owns research compute and cluster infrastructure. You own everything on the organizational side: accounts, devices, identity and access, the FAR.Labs’ office network and the security posture underneath it. In the short- to mid-term future, you will hire an in-person IT Coordinator to handle day-to-day support, and you will manage them. You are the first person on this team, and you will shape what it becomes.
Why This Role / Why Now
IT at FAR.AI has been distributed across finance, business operations, research, and the executive team since our founding. That worked when we were 15 people, but has become a barrier at 50. We’re intentionally not looking for an MSP, and instead looking for someone we’re excited to build alongside. Although our security posture is reasonably strong, we are looking to improve this to withstand targeted AI driven attacks as we increasingly work in security critical areas. We have a documented list of known improvements waiting for an owner, a risk surface that grows with every frontier lab partnership, and researchers who move fast and need to keep moving. You will be working on real problems in your first week, with a mandate to go after root causes.
Key Responsibilities
- IT operations: Own our core internal systems end-to-end: accounts, devices, identity and access management, onboarding and offboarding, the FAR.Labs office network, and the daily support that keeps a growing team working.
- Security remediation: Work through our known security gaps, prioritized by risk. Access controls, endpoint hardening, data protection, data governance, and vendor and application risk are the near-term substance.
- Self-serve infrastructure: Reduce the amount of work that has to route through you. Partner with Business Operations and other teams to design systems and processes that reduce manual work.
- Cross-functional partnership: Work with team leads across Research, Operations, Futures (events), and Communications to understand how they actually work and help them build securely inside their own domains. You work cross-functionally to drive AI adoption.
- Building the team: Hire the in-person IT Coordinator, then manage and develop them. You get to define the role in accordance with the organization’s needs. Over time, this team may grow.
- Internal communication and change management: Roll out changes in a way people can live with. You communicate clearly about what is changing and why, and establish feedback loops to continue iterating post-deployment.
Must-Have Qualifications
- You have owned IT and security at a technical organization of roughly 30 to 150 people, ideally as the first or sole person to do so. You built the function yourself, without a team already in place around you.
- You are comfortable in a terminal and can code. You do not need to be an excellent engineer, but you are not afraid of it. You reach for automation before a manual process.
- You think about the people using what you build. You go after root causes instead of managing symptoms; you can point to a system you redesigned so that a whole class of requests stopped arriving, and you treat that as ongoing work rather than a one-time project.
- You have done hands-on security work driven by threat models. You can say who you were defending against and what you chose not to spend effort on, not just which frameworks you mapped to.
- You have implemented and owned core identity and device infrastructure, including MDM and SSO.
- You are fast and service-oriented. You read the support queue as information about the system, and the people you have supported would say you were reliable.
- You communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences. You can point to a time when you rolled out something that made someone's day harder, and you brought them along anyway.
- You use LLMs regularly in your own work and have an opinion on where they help and where they do not.
Nice-to-Have Qualifications
- You care about AI safety or security, or you are demonstrably curious about it. You understand why this work matters and you help assess the value of the risk we’re taking on.
- You have hired, managed, or mentored a junior teammate.
- You engage with security as a craft outside of work: your own compute build or a home lab, capture-the-flag competitions, side projects, or conferences like DEF CON or CCC.
- You have experience obtaining SOC 2 Type 2 and complying with GDPR. We are open to contracting out much of the work in obtaining certifications – our primary goal is to improve our actual security posture, not achieve certifications, but they may be a necessary step in certain engagements.
- You have experience in fast-paced environments. You've worked in startups, nimble nonprofits, or high-growth teams before and can adapt to change quickly.
- You have worked in a research organization, a deep-tech startup, or a similarly technical environment.
Benefits
- 🩺 Health Insurance - 94% of Insurance premium paid by Organization commencing within 1 month after your start date
- 💰 Retirement - 401(k) plan with up to 2% match
- 🏝️ PTO - 25 days Paid Time Off per year, accrued weekly and up to 10 days of paid sick leave per year
- 🚼 Paid Leave - Paid Bereavement, Family, Medical and Pregnancy Disability Leave
- 🖥️ WFH Stipend & Equipment - Work computer and stipend provided for eligible employees
- 🍽️ Catered Meals (Berkeley Office Only) - Catered lunches and dinners on workdays at our office
- (Available only to full-time employees located in the US)
Interview process
- Test task (we pay for 90 minutes of your time, and most people finish in less)
- Initial screen with a Talent Partner
- Interview with the hiring manager
- Interview with our Head of Research Acceleration
- A full day with the team, either in Berkeley or remote, that includes a working project and conversations across our operations and leadership team.
- Some candidates will have a short final conversation after that.
- References
If you have any questions about the role, feel free to contact us at talent@far.ai. Otherwise, if you don't have questions, the best way to ensure a proper review of your skills and qualifications is by applying directly via the application form. Please don't email us to share your resume (it won't have any impact on our decision). Thank you!
Compensation Range: $185K - $250K
About us
FAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute working to ensure advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research, advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions, and foster a coordinated global response. We’re structured to support that work from early research through real-world adoption: Independent by design. We can pursue what's most impactful based on our theory of change and share what we find publicly. A portfolio approach. Rather than focus on one single direction, we run diverse bets across the safety stack. We take promising ideas from initial experiments to deployment, informed by red-team partnerships with frontier labs and governments. Serious infrastructure for ambitious research. A dedicated engineering team runs our compute cluster and experiment-scaling stack, so researchers spend their time on research instead of on infra. Setting the standard. Our events convene key decision makers; our red-team works with frontier developers and governments; and our communications inform the public. Together, this drives adoption and sets the new standard in safety. Since our founding in July 2022, we've grown to 50+ staff, published 40+ academic papers, and convened leading AI safety events. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML including a Best Paper Honorable Mention in 2026, and ICLR, and features in the Financial Times, Nature News, Wired Magazine and MIT Technology Review. We conduct pre-deployment testing on behalf of frontier developers such as OpenAI and independent evaluations for governments including the EU AI Office and publish the AI Security Leaderboard based on our red-teaming expertise. We help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running FAR.Labs, an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40+ members; and supporting the community through targeted grants to technical researchers.
The Role
We are hiring an IT & Security Manager to keep FAR.AI running reliably and securely as we grow. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks about internal systems the way a security-minded engineer does: curious about what an attacker would actually go after, and more interested in systems that hold up under pressure than in systems that pass an audit. You will report to the COO and work closely with our Head of Research Acceleration, who owns research compute and cluster infrastructure. You own everything on the organizational side: accounts, devices, identity and access, the FAR.Labs’ office network and the security posture underneath it. In the short- to mid-term future, you will hire an in-person IT Coordinator to handle day-to-day support, and you will manage them. You are the first person on this team, and you will shape what it becomes.
Why This Role / Why Now
IT at FAR.AI has been distributed across finance, business operations, research, and the executive team since our founding. That worked when we were 15 people, but has become a barrier at 50. We’re intentionally not looking for an MSP, and instead looking for someone we’re excited to build alongside. Although our security posture is reasonably strong, we are looking to improve this to withstand targeted AI driven attacks as we increasingly work in security critical areas. We have a documented list of known improvements waiting for an owner, a risk surface that grows with every frontier lab partnership, and researchers who move fast and need to keep moving. You will be working on real problems in your first week, with a mandate to go after root causes.
Key Responsibilities
- IT operations: Own our core internal systems end-to-end: accounts, devices, identity and access management, onboarding and offboarding, the FAR.Labs office network, and the daily support that keeps a growing team working.
- Security remediation: Work through our known security gaps, prioritized by risk. Access controls, endpoint hardening, data protection, data governance, and vendor and application risk are the near-term substance.
- Self-serve infrastructure: Reduce the amount of work that has to route through you. Partner with Business Operations and other teams to design systems and processes that reduce manual work.
- Cross-functional partnership: Work with team leads across Research, Operations, Futures (events), and Communications to understand how they actually work and help them build securely inside their own domains. You work cross-functionally to drive AI adoption.
- Building the team: Hire the in-person IT Coordinator, then manage and develop them. You get to define the role in accordance with the organization’s needs. Over time, this team may grow.
- Internal communication and change management: Roll out changes in a way people can live with. You communicate clearly about what is changing and why, and establish feedback loops to continue iterating post-deployment.
Must-Have Qualifications
- You have owned IT and security at a technical organization of roughly 30 to 150 people, ideally as the first or sole person to do so. You built the function yourself, without a team already in place around you.
- You are comfortable in a terminal and can code. You do not need to be an excellent engineer, but you are not afraid of it. You reach for automation before a manual process.
- You think about the people using what you build. You go after root causes instead of managing symptoms; you can point to a system you redesigned so that a whole class of requests stopped arriving, and you treat that as ongoing work rather than a one-time project.
- You have done hands-on security work driven by threat models. You can say who you were defending against and what you chose not to spend effort on, not just which frameworks you mapped to.
- You have implemented and owned core identity and device infrastructure, including MDM and SSO.
- You are fast and service-oriented. You read the support queue as information about the system, and the people you have supported would say you were reliable.
- You communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences. You can point to a time when you rolled out something that made someone's day harder, and you brought them along anyway.
- You use LLMs regularly in your own work and have an opinion on where they help and where they do not.
Nice-to-Have Qualifications
- You care about AI safety or security, or you are demonstrably curious about it. You understand why this work matters and you help assess the value of the risk we’re taking on.
- You have hired, managed, or mentored a junior teammate.
- You engage with security as a craft outside of work: your own compute build or a home lab, capture-the-flag competitions, side projects, or conferences like DEF CON or CCC.
- You have experience obtaining SOC 2 Type 2 and complying with GDPR. We are open to contracting out much of the work in obtaining certifications – our primary goal is to improve our actual security posture, not achieve certifications, but they may be a necessary step in certain engagements.
- You have experience in fast-paced environments. You've worked in startups, nimble nonprofits, or high-growth teams before and can adapt to change quickly.
- You have worked in a research organization, a deep-tech startup, or a similarly technical environment.
Benefits
- 🩺 Health Insurance - 94% of Insurance premium paid by Organization commencing within 1 month after your start date
- 💰 Retirement - 401(k) plan with up to 2% match
- 🏝️ PTO - 25 days Paid Time Off per year, accrued weekly and up to 10 days of paid sick leave per year
- 🚼 Paid Leave - Paid Bereavement, Family, Medical and Pregnancy Disability Leave
- 🖥️ WFH Stipend & Equipment - Work computer and stipend provided for eligible employees
- 🍽️ Catered Meals (Berkeley Office Only) - Catered lunches and dinners on workdays at our office
- (Available only to full-time employees located in the US)
Interview process
- Test task (we pay for 90 minutes of your time, and most people finish in less)
- Initial screen with a Talent Partner
- Interview with the hiring manager
- Interview with our Head of Research Acceleration
- A full day with the team, either in Berkeley or remote, that includes a working project and conversations across our operations and leadership team.
- Some candidates will have a short final conversation after that.
- References
If you have any questions about the role, feel free to contact us at talent@far.ai. Otherwise, if you don't have questions, the best way to ensure a proper review of your skills and qualifications is by applying directly via the application form. Please don't email us to share your resume (it won't have any impact on our decision). Thank you!
Compensation Range: $185K - $250K
Security Engineer Job Roles in California
See all 496+ Security Engineer Jobs in California
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Search Security Engineer Jobs in CaliforniaSecurity Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for security engineers in California?
California's largest technology employers are among the most active H-1B sponsors for security engineers. Google, Apple, Meta, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, and Broadcom have all appeared consistently in Department of Labor LCA disclosure data for security engineering roles. Defense and aerospace contractors in Southern California, including Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, also sponsor work visas for security-focused positions.
Which visa types are most common for security engineer roles in California?
The H-1B is the most common visa category for security engineers in California, as the role typically qualifies as a specialty occupation requiring a bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, cybersecurity, or a related field. Candidates with extraordinary achievements may qualify for the O-1A. Nationals of Australia, Canada, or Mexico may have additional options through the E-3 visa or TN visa categories respectively.
Which cities in California have the most security engineer sponsorship jobs?
The San Francisco Bay Area, particularly San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Francisco itself, concentrates the largest share of security engineer sponsorship jobs in California. Los Angeles is a growing secondary market, especially for roles in fintech, entertainment technology, and defense. San Diego has a notable cluster of cybersecurity positions tied to defense contractors and biotech companies.
How to find security engineer visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for international candidates and filters security engineer job listings in California by visa sponsorship availability, saving you from sorting through roles that won't consider work authorization. You can browse current openings from companies with verified sponsorship histories for security engineering positions across Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego employers, all in one place.
Are there any California-specific factors to know when pursuing security engineer sponsorship?
California's prevailing wage requirements for H-1B positions are among the highest in the country due to the state's elevated cost of living, particularly in the Bay Area. Many security engineering roles in California also require background checks or security clearances, especially for defense and government contractors, which can affect eligibility for non-U.S. citizens. University pipelines from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UC San Diego supply significant international talent into sponsored roles.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored security engineer jobs in California?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.