Staff Security Engineer

This posting reflects a current, actively recruited opening at Float. All applications are being reviewed on a rolling basis.

About Float

Float is on a mission to simplify finance for Canadian businesses, empowering them to eliminate complexity and unlock new opportunities. Through our innovative platform, Float enables businesses to streamline financial operations and optimize cash flow, so they can focus on what matters most: growth.

As one of Canada’s fastest growing companies and top-rated startups in 2025, 2024 and 2023, Float is customer-obsessed, passionate and entrepreneurial, with a team that includes leaders from Uber, Stripe, Shopify, Top Hat, Ada, Doordash, Snowflake, and Wealthsimple.

At Float, everyone is an owner, bringing their unique perspective to our team and product. Your voice is important, and we take having a culture based on feedback seriously. We openly share our thoughts and differing opinions so we can continue to improve. We do our best to keep our decision-making decentralized so that all team members feel ownership in our success.

Our Product

Float is Canada’s intelligent financial operating system, combining modern financial services and software to help businesses spend, save, and grow. Trusted by more than 10,000 Canadian companies, Float provides high-limit corporate cards, automated expense management, next-day bill payments, high-yield accounts, and industry-leading support, all built in Canada, for Canada. Float recently announced our $85 million Series C, and is backed by world-class investors, including Inovia Capital, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, OMERS Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.

Our team is a collection of ambitious, collaborative and mission-driven people from all walks of life but with one goal: helping Canadian companies not just survive but thrive. And we’re looking for bold innovators to help shape the future of business finance in Canada.

AI Use in Our Hiring Process

We use technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), to support parts of our hiring process. This may include AI-assisted scheduling and candidate communications, and AI-generated interview notes, guides or summaries to help our team focus on the conversation. All hiring decisions are made by our hiring team.

About the Role

We're hiring Float's first Staff Security Engineer, to own the technical direction of our security platform: application, infrastructure and identity security. Our security team is small and builds more than it buys. We write our own detections, run our own agent platform, and fix things at the root. Float's engineers build quickly and we don't run big security gates, so your job is to make the secure path the easy one. You'll take a complex area of security, own it from end to end, and design the fixes alongside engineering, then drive them through to adoption across product teams. You'll look ahead too, setting up the foundations for new products, and for how we run AI tools safely, well before teams start building. You'll work as a peer to our staff and principal engineers, and explain big architectural changes and the risk behind them in a way that moves everyone toward the outcome.

What You'll Be Responsible For

• Own the technical strategy for security platform work: set standards, write down decisions, and explain risk to leadership in business terms.

• Own a major area of security end to end, from the risks and the plan through to shipped improvements.

• Build security primitives into our core backend (Python and Django), such as default-closed authorization and tenancy scoping, then lead adoption across every product team.

• Shape our customer identity platform: passwords, passkeys, SSO/SAML and machine-to-machine authentication.

• Threat model and review the architecture and code of new products and large changes, and help redesign things so they are better, not only point out what's wrong.

• Secure how we use AI: our internal agent platform, MCP gateways, and the data that flows through them.

• Look ahead and put security foundations in place about six months before teams start building in a new area.

• Lead multi-quarter efforts across several engineers as the security voice in the room, with minimal drag on engineering delivery, and mentor engineers on and off the security team.

• Present significant architectural and engineering changes, with the risks, to engineers and leaders so they understand and act.

• Harden our CI/CD and software supply chain, and turn controls into code (infrastructure as code, policy as code) instead of manual work.

• Help secure the platform as we move to Kubernetes: workload isolation, network policy, IAM and secrets.

• Build in-house tools and capabilities where it makes more sense than buying them as Float grows.

• Give timely, practical advice early in the process so teams spend less time waiting on security.

• Identify blind spots across the company and help set priorities for where security should invest.

• Use AI tools to move faster on threat modelling, reviews, investigation and building.

About You

Here's what sets you up for success at Float:

• You Put Customers First, Always. You care deeply about delivering meaningful value. Whether you're building internal systems or customer-facing features, you're always thinking about how to make life better for our users.

• You Act Like an Owner. You take responsibility for outcomes, step up to challenges, and seek solutions proactively - doing what's best for the business, not just your role.

• You Think Big and Move Fast. You're energized by building from 0 to 1. You're not afraid to challenge the status quo, experiment quickly, and learn as you go.

• You Constantly Learn and Grow. You're hungry to improve your craft and open to feedback. You bring a growth mindset to everything you do.

• You Raise the Bar. You care about doing things well and efficiently. You balance speed with rigor and always look for ways to improve how we work.

• You Win as a Team. You're a generous collaborator who values communication, context, and shared wins. You lift others up and help make the team stronger.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of experience as a software engineer or security engineer, at a company large enough that you built systems and tools yourself.

• Depth in at least one of application security, identity, or cloud and infrastructure security, and credibility across the rest.

• You ship production code to fix what you find, in Python and Django or a similar web stack.

• Hands-on experience designing and building security controls, tooling or systems, and the engineering depth to be a peer to staff-level engineers.

• You've led a multi-quarter, cross-team technical change through influence, not authority.

• A real interest in security, shown by what you've built, learned or owned.

• Experience owning a complex technical problem and shipping it from start to finish.

• Clear, direct writing and communication with engineers and leaders, able to explain architecture and risk in business terms in a way that leads to action.

• Practical examples of using AI in your engineering or security work.

Nice to have:

• Fintech, payments or PCI DSS experience.

• Building or running an identity platform at scale.

• Detection engineering or incident response.

• Experience securing LLM or agent systems.

• Experience with container and Kubernetes infrastructure security.

• Experience bringing a bought tool in-house.

This May Not Be the Role for You If

• You prefer to report findings and leave the fixes to others, or you don't ship production code.

• You'd rather ship a fix once than drive it through adoption across many teams.

• You like to act as a gatekeeper, with a firm "must" and a firm "no", more than as a partner to engineering.

• Your experience is mainly configuring and running purchased security products or managing compliance.

• You'd rather be embedded in implementation than set direction and bring others along.

• You're resistant to AI-enabled ways of working.

Our Hiring Philosophy

We hire for character, curiosity, and learning velocity before credentials. Titles matter less than impact, and every hire is expected to raise the bar for Float as a whole.

Why You Should Join

• Be part of an award winning company: we're one of Canada’s Top Growing Companies 2026 according to Report on Business, and Deloitte’s Technology Fast50 2026

• Make a real impact in a high-autonomy, high-growth role

• Collaborate with an ambitious and supportive team

• Competitive compensation, equity options, and benefits

• Hybrid work model: we are based in Toronto with in-office days for connection and collaboration

• Enjoy catered team lunches every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday

• Bring your pup to our dog-friendly office

• Thrive in a high-trust, high-performance culture where your work truly matters

In Short

At Float, you’ll thrive if you’re bold, curious, and eager to make a real impact. We're building something special - and having a lot of fun along the way. If you’re excited to build, grow, and win together, we’d love to meet you.

Protect yourself from recruiting scams. Float only contacts candidates from @floatfinancial.com addresses and schedules interviews through Ashby or Float calendar invites. We will never ask you to install software, pay a fee, buy equipment or share bank or card details. If something looks off, don't engage.

We’re committed to building a workplace that’s welcoming and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations during the hiring process or once you join Float, just let us know! You can reach out to Vic (victoria@floatfinancial.com), and we’ll work with you to make sure you have what you need to succeed.