Head of Security Engineering

About the role

Collections today works like an emergency room. The doctors carry too many patients, everyone arrives at their worst moment, and nobody has their chart. We're making it primary care. January personalizes interactions and optimizes decisions across every stage of consumer credit. We started in the hardest, most broken stage, because if it works there it works anywhere.

Most consumers want to pay what they owe. They want a way out, not a break. We've serviced over $20 billion in debt across more than 20 million consumers. We see more people with charged-off loans each year than all but the top five US banks. Those consumers rate us about 50% higher than the banks that lent them the money. Creditors net over 30% more because we collect more and charge less.

Most AI strips the human out of the work. We use it to make someone's hardest financial moment more human. The more human we make it, the more people recover. Now we're moving upstream, catching people before they default and building across every stage of the consumer credit lifecycle. The consumer in collections today is the consumer who gets approved tomorrow.

About the Role

As our Head of Security, you'll help us maintain and radically improve a proactive security posture that ensures compliance with industry standards, mitigates real risks, and enhances client confidence in how we handle sensitive data. This role will report directly to the VP of Engineering; expect to drive strategic security initiatives, implement effective monitoring and response systems, and foster a culture of security awareness and excellence within the organization.

You will

• Define and own the strategy for security engineering, deciding where the real risk is and what we do about it.
• Hire, mentor, and grow the security engineering team as the function scales.
• Lead identity and access management across our systems.
• Direct security monitoring, detection, and incident response.
• Own our security posture for AI, in both our products and internal tools.
• Manage cloud security architecture and guardrails, including data isolation across our multi-tenant platform.
• Own vulnerability management end to end, partnering with Engineering to build security into the development lifecycle.
• Partner with our compliance function to support SOC2, PCI, and other audit and regulatory work.

What We Need

• 6+ years of experience in security, including 2+ years in a leadership role.
• Hands-on software or security engineering background. You've built and run cloud security, identity and access, and detection systems yourself.
• Prior experience working in a regulated industry (financial services, healthcare, payments, etc.).
• Track record of setting security strategy and driving it to execution at an early- or growth-stage company, where you build the playbook yourself.
• Strong communicator and collaborator, with a track record of building trust across Engineering, Product, and other teams.
• Preferred: strong understanding of how AI/ML systems work and where they introduce risk.

How We Work

• Decentralization beats control. The best calls get made by the people closest to them, not routed up a chain. You'll set the standards that let the team decide without you in the room.
• Speed beats perfection. You run tight loops, act at 70% on reversible calls and adjust as you learn. Fast loops beat slow ones.
• Candor beats comfort. You'd rather hear a hard truth early than a polite sidestep that wastes everyone's time.
• Writing beats the average meeting. Clarity scales.
• AI runs through everything here. 95% of our consumer interactions are AI-driven. Internally, we've built an LLM code reviewer and approver. We benchmark coding agents against real tickets so we can automate more of them. Over the last six months, Engineering has doubled how much we can ship. Non-technical teams are just as fluent in AI - anyone can spin up a custom LLM Slackbot, and everyone consistently builds AI tools and skills that are shipped org-wide.
• We operate at every altitude. No one here lives only on Mount Olympus, not even the leaders. We get into the trenches to learn the ground truth. We constantly refine our information flows so that our decisions are driven by the best, most up to date inputs.
• We build in person, at least three days a week in our office in Nolita, with a growing group coming in every day. Random run-ins cross-pollinate ideas. Face time builds trust no thread can. Building alongside people makes work far more fun.

As a New York City-based company, we are dedicated to transparent, fair, and equitable compensation practices that reflect our commitment to fostering an environment where all team members are valued and supported. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.