[Hiring] Head of Privacy & Security @Playlab

Role Description

Playlab seeks a Head of Security & Privacy to lead our security and privacy efforts and protect the students, educators, and partners who use the platform. You will drive the security engineering, compliance, and privacy programs forward with end-to-end ownership of risk and customer assurance. You will promote effective and thoughtful decision making to reduce uncertainty and increase organizational velocity.

The building blocks are in place, but the next phase of Playlab’s security, compliance, and privacy programs will require maturing and scaling with a growing organization. Playlab’s mission depends on safeguarding educational data for users around the world. Earning trust means delivering on a roadmap that spans tackling AI threats, tracking evolving privacy legislation, and building security automation that makes Playlab a leader in the space.

Examples of the work

• Stand up SIEM and detection engineering pipelines to alert on and investigate anomalies before they turn into incidents
• Standardize and enforce RBAC on critical systems, including non-human and AI agent identities
• Add LLM-assisted and highly contextual code analysis to security-relevant pull requests, addressing tenant isolation and prompt injection threats
• Design data de-identification and isolation approaches for privacy-by-design use cases

Expectations

• Keep an up-to-date risk register and security roadmap, communicating clearly through regular updates
• Support engineering team with secure design reviews that provide actionable and tradeoff-informed recommendations
• Equip customer-facing teams with top-notch trust center content, including security knowledge bases and customer assurance collateral
• Lead SOC 2 compliance operations and audits to reduce overhead on engineering and support teams
• Lead the incident response function to ensure rapid recovery capabilities
• Partner with Trust and Safety on child safety and responsible AI deployments
• Work cross-functionally to build partnerships instead of roadblocks

Qualifications

• 7+ years in security roles, with at least 3 years in leadership positions
• Background implementing security controls in fast-moving engineering organizations - you know how to balance security with velocity
• Demonstrated examples of projects tackling AppSec challenges and integrating with software development (DevSecOps)
• Experience securing container-based cloud environments (Playlab is on AWS EKS) including IAM, virtual network security, and logging and auditing capabilities
• Experience leading GDPR compliance and SOC 2 audits
• Excellent writing and communication abilities, turning complicated problems into actionable consensus

Bonus Points For...

• Background in education data privacy (e.g. FERPA, COPPA)
• Experience defending systems from AI threats (e.g. prompt injection)
• Experience in nonprofit or mission-driven organizations

Technologies

• AWS
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• GitHub
• Google Workspace
• Vanta
• Linear
• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Vercel

Benefits

• Build the engineering team behind AI in education
• Real closeness to users
• Impact over growth
• Mission-aligned team
• Flexible work
• Competitive pay & benefits