Engineering Manager, Application Security

About Synthesia

Synthesia is the world’s leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow.

Location: Europe remote or London hybrid

About the Role

As our engineering and research organization grows, so does the complexity of securing it. Our Application Security team is at the forefront of that challenge — building AI-native security tooling, embedding security into the development lifecycle at scale, and finding ways to make a small, highly capable team punch well above its weight.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow the AppSec team. This is not a coordination role. You'll be leading a team of exceptionally senior and staff-level engineers who are deeply self-directed and technically excellent. To earn their trust and enable their best work, you'll need to be genuinely close to the craft — able to engage at depth on threat modelling, agentic security tooling, SDLC design, and application risk. You'll also own AppSec strategy and be accountable for how the function scales alongside a product organisation that is growing fast and leaning heavily into AI-assisted development.

Important note: Anyone working as a manager within the Infosec team will need to follow the Infosec Team Management Tenets.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, support, enable and grow the AppSec team — owning hiring, onboarding, performance, and career development for a team of Senior and Staff-level Security Engineers. We need someone to enable the team to do what needs doing and to give them the best possible environment to do it in.
• Own the formalisation of AppSec strategy and roadmap, translating team input, business risk and engineering context into a clear, prioritised programme of work with measurable outcomes.
• Be a credible technical partner to your team — able to engage substantively on threat models, security architecture, agentic tooling design, and risk decisions, and willing to get into the details when it matters.
• Define and maintain the team's operating rhythm: OKRs, quarterly planning, cross-team coordination, and stakeholder communication up to leadership.
• Act as a key interface between AppSec and the rest of the organisation and leadership — building relationships with business leadership, engineering leads, the Developer Platform team, Architecture Working Group, and partner functions like Legal and Moderation, to embed security into how Synthesia builds.
• Participate in maintaining and evolving Synthesia's approach to AI-assisted development security, including how we secure our own use of agentic coding tools and how we assess the security of AI-generated code.
• Own AppSec's relationship with the broader Security function, ensuring tight alignment between AppSec and other Infosec teams on shared risks, incidents, and cross-cutting initiatives.
• Represent AppSec externally where relevant — with customers, auditors, and in the context of compliance programmes such as SOC2 and ISO42001.

What's in it for you

• Lead a small, senior team with high autonomy, focusing on creating leverage.
• Work in a leading AI company with high-growth and a friendly culture.
• Build and ship AI-native / agentic security tooling end-to-end, from prototypes to production systems.
• Operate at the intersection of product, platform, and security architecture, with scope to shape how secure-by-default looks in a rapidly scaling AI company.

Experience & Qualifications

You're a Security Engineer first, who has grown into leadership. You're comfortable in the details and know when to roll up your sleeves, but you've also developed the organizational instincts to run a team effectively and the strategic clarity to own a function.

• Strong communication skills, able to operate across audiences from technical discussions to leadership framing.
• Strong engineering background in application security, with hands-on experience in threat modeling, secure design review, (AI-)SAST/SCA tooling, vulnerability management, and/or security automation.
• Comfortable with Python and JavaScript. Experience with AWS and/or GCP, and GitHub Actions.
• Meaningful people management experience — hiring, growing, and performance-managing security engineers.
• Led or significantly contributed to an AppSec program in a fast-growing SaaS or AI company.
• A genuine point of view on AI-native security engineering — understanding how LLMs and agentic tools change the attack surface and how to use them defensively.
• Experience in an environment with a mature engineering culture, understanding how to embed security collaboratively.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with Kubernetes (operational/security perspective).
• Familiarity with Semgrep, Wiz, CrowdStrike, HackerOne, Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Actions, StepSecurity.
• Prior experience as a Staff or Principal security engineer before moving into management.

Synthesia Values

• Be an owner
• Focus on outcomes over Inputs and Plans
• Make the journey fun
• Default to simple

Benefits

• Flexible, remote-friendly role based out of Europe or one of our hubs (London, Copenhagen, Munich, Zurich).
• 25 days of annual leave + public holidays.
• Generous referral scheme.
• Work from home setup.
• Work from anywhere (within reason) in the world for up to 60 days per year.
• A huge opportunity for career growth as you’ll help shape a market-defining product.