Senior Engineering Manager, Guardian
Semgrep is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager, Guardian in San Francisco, United States. It pays $230k-$288k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Semgrep.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Some of the work can be done remotely, according to the posting.
- The posting mentions AI agents, engineering management and application security among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Semgrep has 12 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Lead the Guardian platform team integrating deterministic security analysis into developer workflows and AI agent loops.
About Semgrep
Semgrep, the leader in code security for builders, empowers invention without friction. Teams catch, flag, and fix real issues before they ship, powered by security that learns as they build. Semgrep secures code as it’s written and provides guardrails that pave the road for developers to move fast and stay secure. Built for builders and trusted by security, Semgrep lives where developers work, delivering fixes without breaking flow, and giving security teams visibility, control, and confidence. Semgrep gets smarter as you build, with AI that learns your context to cut false positives and prioritize reachable vulnerabilities, validated by 95% of security reviewers across 6M+ findings. Semgrep makes zero false positives a reality with AppSec teams triaging 80% fewer false positives across Code and Supply Chain, dramatically shrinking the backlog.
Founded in San Francisco and backed by Menlo Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, Semgrep is recognized by Gartner in Application Security Testing and is trusted by leading organizations, including Vanta, Lyft, and Dropbox. Learn more at semgrep.dev.
About the role
As a Senior Engineering Manager for Semgrep Guardian, you'll lead the platform team making security a native property of software at the moment it's written — not a gate applied afterward. Code is increasingly authored inside AI agents, the MCP layer, and the IDE, and Guardian is the platform layer that embeds Semgrep's deterministic security analysis directly into that loop. Semgrep's detection teams own best-in-class SAST, secrets, SCA, and malware engines; Guardian owns the integration, orchestration, and distribution that turn them into a single, low-latency risk verdict an agent or developer can act on in the moment.
Your team owns the surfaces where that verdict is produced and consumed — agent-harness hooks and the partner SDK, the security MCP server, IDE and editor extensions, the orchestration and policy layer, and the unified risk API. Success is measured not by findings produced, but by adoption of that verdict across Semgrep's products, our partners' agents and IDEs, and the trust developers place in it. Through Semgrep's culture of transparency, you'll see and influence the decisions that make a startup successful.
You will:
Work closely with your product and design partners to create a roadmap for the success of your platform that balances iterative changes with big bets
Prioritize and direct your team's schedule, balancing the needs of developing new technology, serving internal and external consumers, and maintaining internal technical quality
Retain and strengthen engineers with coaching and mentorship, regular feedback, performance reviews, and performance management when necessary
Build an environment of trust that rewards creativity, risk taking, and personal responsibility
Continually grow your team through the hiring of diverse, productive, high-level technical talent
Please note, this role sits onsite 3 days a week in either of our office hubs( San Francisco, New York City, Denver, or Boston).
You are ideal for this role if you have:3+ years of experience leading software engineering teams
A strong foundation in product development and bringing products to production via a multi-disciplinary engineering team — including understanding best practices for design, iterative milestone creation, and utilizing customer feedback
Familiarity with agile development principles and iterative milestone development
A strong desire to help engineers and other leaders grow through coaching and mentorship
You have opinions on building durable platforms, APIs, or SDKs for demanding consumers; have worked on developer tooling, IDE/editor extensions, or AI agent, MCP, and protocol integrations; or have built a security product before
Compensation
The estimated starting annual salary range for this position is $230,000 to $288,000 USD. The actual base salary will be determined based on a number of factors, which may include job-related skills, relevant experience, qualifications, location, internal equity, and market data. In addition to base salary, total compensation may include equity, variable compensation, and benefits. We view equity as a meaningful part of our compensation philosophy and a way for employees to share in the long-term value they help create.
Compensation ranges are reviewed regularly and may be adjusted as the role, individual performance, or market conditions evolve.
What we offer (FTE only)
Our goal is to competitively and fairly compensate every Semgrep employee with a system that equally rewards those who are vocal and those who are less comfortable making demands during the final steps of the hiring process. To that end, we generate internal compensation bands that are used when discussing and negotiating salaries. We update these based on market data to make sure they’re above the average for comparable roles.
We invest in our employees’ well-being and long-term success through a competitive, market-aligned benefits program that meets or exceeds local market standards across all of the regions in which we hire. Benefits offerings vary by location to reflect local requirements and norms. For more detailed, location-specific information, please visit Semgrep Benefits.
Who we are
We bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines—from physics and philosophy to formal methods research and full-fledged corporations. We’re new parents and new grads, dog lovers and dogfooders. We get together often to bike, bake, and meet up in parks. In our interactions, we believe respect and honesty go hand in hand, and prioritize both.
Semgrep is an equal-opportunity employer seeking a diverse range of backgrounds. We value who you are — including your cultural heritage, your socioeconomic status, your age, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your disabilities. We value what’s vitally important to you — your family, your religion, your politics. We value what you love in this world — your music, your weekend pursuits. We believe in welcoming varied professional backgrounds, educations, and interests. If you’re exceptional in your role, believe in Semgrep’s mission, and treat Semgrep’s values as your own, you belong here.
Please Note: For US-based roles open to remote work, we are currently able to hire employees in the following states only: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.
How we rate this
Senior Engineering Manager, Guardian at Semgrep rates 60 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a project where engineering management was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where application security was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where sast was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where api integration was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Engineering Management, Application Security, Sast, and API Integration. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
Want an expert to read your CV for this job?
Free. Send your CV and the role you want next. We reply by email within 2 to 4 business days.
Get new remote software engineering jobs (Works on AI ●●●○ or higher) by email
One email a week with the new remote software engineering jobs (Works on AI ●●●○ or higher), each rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.
Similar roles
Software Engineering roles that work on AI, at other companies.
What kind of AI work fits you?
Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.
Find my next step