Software Engineer, AI & Automation

At NerdWallet, we're building tools and experiences that help people make smarter financial decisions. As a Software Engineer focused on AI & Automation within our Security organization, you'll build production software and AI-enabled systems that make security work more scalable, effective, and developer-friendly across NerdWallet. You'll apply strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on AI experience to automate complex security workflows, build internal platforms and developer tooling, and help us rethink how security engineering operates in an AI-native environment. You do not need to come from a traditional security engineering background. This role reports to the Security Automation Manager.

• Design and build AI-enabled workflows and multi-agent systems that automate security design review, threat modeling, policy Q&A, vulnerability analysis, and other high-value security processes.
• Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and semantic search experiences across large code and documentation repositories.
• Create automated code-review capabilities that help identify insecure patterns and improve software quality earlier in the development lifecycle.
• Build production Python services and APIs that power AI-enabled security workflows, with thoughtful architecture, authentication, authorization, testing, observability, and reliability.
• Design and operate scalable pipelines that ingest, process, index, and retrieve large volumes of code, documents, and events.
• Improve AI system quality through evaluation frameworks, experiment management, prompt and context management, observability, and evidence-based iteration.
• Manage practical production tradeoffs such as latency, reliability, model/provider selection, token usage, and cost.
• Design integrations with GitHub, Slack, Jira, Confluence, LLM providers, and internal services so security guidance fits naturally into engineering workflows.
• Apply security controls to AI applications, including prompt injection defenses, sensitive-data handling, access control, supply-chain considerations, and safe model inputs and outputs.
• Identify new opportunities for software, automation, and AI augmentation across the Security team and independently move high-value ideas from problem definition through production.

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production software.
• Strong Python proficiency, including hands-on experience building production backend services and APIs.
• Experience designing maintainable backend architectures, including separation of concerns, request/response validation, authentication/authorization, error handling, testing, and observability.
• Experience developing distributed or cloud-based systems and making practical decisions about scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Hands-on experience building production AI-enabled applications or automations using LLM APIs, agents/tool use, RAG/retrieval, or comparable architectures.
• Experience defining, evaluating, and improving the quality of AI-enabled systems in production.
• Ability to work through ambiguity, identify opportunities independently, and move technical work from idea to implementation.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical decisions, tradeoffs, and limitations clearly.
• Interest in secure software development and willingness to build deeper expertise in application security and AI security.

Compensation: $127K – $207K USD salary, plus equity.

Benefits include: industry-leading medical, dental, and vision health care plans; flexible vacation time off + 11 holidays + holiday company shutdown; new parent leave; mental health support; paid sabbatical after 5 years; health and dependent care FSA and HSA with monthly NerdWallet contribution; monthly wellness stipend, cell phone stipend, and wifi stipend (remote only); work from home equipment stipend and co-working space subsidy (remote only); 401K with 4% company match; disability and life insurance with employer-paid premiums.

Apply via the provided link.