The posting
Few people get to build a bank from scratch. Even fewer get to build one at a moment when banking itself is being reinvented.
The Dollar is the best product in the history of the world - there is infinite global demand. But International Fintechs and non-US banks are left with two unsatisfying options to access it: Either they build on legacy clearing banks that are slow and unreliable, or they interface with middleware providers that don’t move and hold the dollars directly, but themselves rely on underlying legacy banks. Augustus collapses this stack by combining two things: A real, national bank charter (in organization), and Marble, our proprietary core banking system, built around intelligence, made of code.
We are a group of operators, unicorn early employees, ex-founders and people who walked away from degrees because they believe this is an industry and career defining opportunity. We are backed with more than $200M from Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, Tiger Global, Hummingbird, QED, Creandum, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Deel, Circle, Fluidstack, Fuse, and n8n.
We are regulated in Europe and live with Euro and Stablecoin clearing today. Now, we are building the US team from the ground up, while continuing to grow rapidly in Europe.
THE ROLE
You will own security engineering end-to-end across application, infrastructure, and incident response: partnering with product and platform teams during design, writing and shipping security automation in production, and leading high-quality response when something breaks. Day to day, you will help define security in a greenfield modern bank, moving beyond threat modeling, harden cloud and CI/CD paths, build detection and response workflows, and drive remediation to closure with clear risk tradeoffs. This role reports to the CISO. What matters most is measurable risk reduction that keeps product velocity high.
YOUR FIRST SIX MONTHS
Understand the foundations and increase your ownership rapidly.
- Months 1-2: Enforce an SSDLC that codifies existing security goals across EU-live payment/ledger services and US launch-critical services into required design, build, and release checkpoints (ownership, control evidence, and exception handling), with 100% of net-new Tier-1 changes following the workflow.
- Months 3-4: Stand up an AI-native product-security review pipeline that auto-triages code/dependency/IaC findings by service criticality, proposes fixes in pull requests, and routes owner-tagged remediation tasks and reduces non-actionable security alerts.
- Months 5-6: Expand baseline coverage to >=85% of Tier-1 services for workload identity hardening, secret management standards, runtime audit logging, and high-severity dependency monitoring; start monthly control-evidence reporting to Security & Compliance.
WHO WILL THRIVE AT AUGUSTUS
We believe that throwing smart people with high agency at big problems produces the best outcomes. The people who succeed here share the following traits:
- Relentless: You can't leave something broken. You don't stop because it got hard or because no one is watching.
- Set The Bar: You're harder on yourself than anyone else would be. You don't need external accountability to care about quality.
- Shape The Game: You don't wait for a playbook and you don't need one. You walk into genuinely new territory and figure it out. You move before anyone asked you to.
- Systems First: You don't solve problems by adding people or effort. You build systems that make the problem smaller. Your first instinct is to automate, not to handle it manually.
This role is for you if:
- You can point to security automation you personally built that replaced recurring manual review work.
- You have strong product security fundamentals and can improve secure-by-default patterns in fast-moving engineering teams.
- You have led end-to-end rollout of security controls in production, from design and implementation through adoption and evidence.
- You regularly influence architecture decisions before launch through fast, lightweight risk reviews and pragmatic controls.
- You are comfortable writing production-grade code or infrastructure changes, not only policy or tickets.
- You use AI tooling to accelerate security reviews and remediation planning without lowering quality or signal.
- You push ambiguous work forward without waiting for a complete playbook, and you bring stakeholders with you.
This is not for you if:
- You prefer advisory-only security roles and do not want direct implementation ownership.
- You need tightly scoped tickets to make progress and are uncomfortable defining the plan yourself.
- You avoid ownership of production systems and control implementation work.
- You optimize for stability over change and are not excited by early-stage ambiguity.
HARD REQUIREMENTS
- Extensive experience in hands-on security engineering, product security, cloud security, or detection/response engineering in production environments
- Demonstrated expertise securing cloud-based systems (IAM, networking, logging, key management, workload isolation) and CI/CD pipelines
- Proven experience building at least one security automation or detection capability that is actively used in production
- Experience in fintech, payments, banking, or another regulated environment with audit and control evidence requirements
- Experience with modern security tooling, especially SIEM/SOAR and cloud security platforms
- Located in (or willing to relocate to) Berlin and able to work in-office 3 days/week
PAY TRANSPARENCY
Compensation packages at Augustus include base salary, equity, and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidate's experience, expertise and geographic location. The annual base salary range for this role is €100,000-€150,000 + equity.
WHAT WE OFFER
- Career Growth: You will be given more responsibility and pushed to grow faster than ever before.
- Network: Your peers are brilliant, highly motivated people. These people will be foundational in your future opportunities.
- Real Participation: Employees are shareholders. You will think and act like an owner.
- Perks & Benefits: Relocation support, visa support, the latest Apple gear (MacBook + AirPods), lunch benefit, gym benefit, a beautiful office in the heart of the city, 4x on-/offsites per year, and an annual development budget.
Additional to the global benefits above, we offer localized benefits such as comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance and a 401(k) retirement plan for our US team.
Augustus is committed to creating an inclusive environment where people from all backgrounds can thrive and where different viewpoints and experiences are valued and respected. Augustus will consider all applications for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, national origin, religious beliefs, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, disability, age, parental or veteran status.
