Founding Security Engineer

Forus is building an AI-powered network that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to accelerate new science to patients.
Our platform automates the complexity between a doctor prescribing a medicine and a patient starting treatment, including insurance coverage, financial assistance, and supply chain navigation. We provide this support free to doctors and patients, helping them get life-changing medicine faster, cheaper, and easier. The resulting network enables biopharma companies to design better research, launch new drugs more effectively, and invest in harder-to-treat conditions.
Forus has exceptional product-market fit and is growing rapidly through organic adoption:

• Accelerating scale: We already support patients across more than 80% of ZIP codes and partner with 5 of the 10 largest biopharma companies in the world.

• AI-native, durable model: Our business becomes stronger as AI improves, as every new doctor, patient, and partner makes the network more valuable.

• Backing to build for the long term: We raised $160M+ from leading investors to build an exceptional team and unlock the full scale of the opportunity.

Our number one priority is scaling to market demand. We are looking for individuals who are high horsepower, high throughput, and hyper resourceful to help us increase capacity and grow. We move fast and need to move faster.
If we succeed, science will be the only limit to medicine.

All full-time roles are in person in New York.

As a Founding Security Engineer at Forus, you will build the security foundation for a company using AI to remove the barriers between patients and medicine. Our platform handles protected health information and powers time-sensitive access workflows across providers, payers, and life sciences partners. Security is therefore both a technical requirement and a prerequisite for earning the trust that lets us scale.

This is a broad, deeply technical role. You will own cloud and infrastructure security across AWS and GCP, build security into the product, secure how our AI systems handle sensitive data, and establish detection and incident response, including the audit trails that show how protected data is accessed. As our first security engineer, you will make foundational architecture decisions, build the secure primitives other engineers use, and set the technical bar for how Forus scales.

This is a demanding role, with a high level of autonomy and responsibility. You will be expected to act like an owner and commit yourself to Forus’ success. If you are low-ego, hungry to learn, and excited about intense, impactful work that drives both company growth and accelerated career progression, we want to hear from you.

• Own cloud and infrastructure security across AWS and GCP, including guardrails, identity and network architecture, secrets management, and secure-by-default primitives

• Build security into product architecture and development workflows through secure design reviews, code review, authentication and authorization hardening, and reusable tooling that makes the secure path the easiest one

• Establish detection, logging, audit trails, and incident response for systems handling protected health information, and lead the technical response when something goes wrong

• Secure our corporate and identity surface, including SSO, device and endpoint security, SaaS hardening, and access across the employee lifecycle

• Design isolation and data-flow controls for agentic AI systems, defending against sensitive-data leakage across model pipelines and tool use

• Build the automation and security-as-code that lets engineers move quickly while implementing the technical controls behind SOC 2, HIPAA, and HITRUST.

• Partner with Legal, Compliance, and GTM to translate regulatory and customer requirements into practical controls that we can ship

• 7+ years in security engineering, grounded in a strong software engineering foundation. You design and implement systems, not just review them

• Deep, hands-on cloud security experience across AWS and/or GCP, including infrastructure as code and building security foundations rather than only configuring managed services

• Range across infrastructure, application, identity, and detection and response, with the judgment to operate as the first security engineer

• Experience protecting sensitive data at scale; experience with PHI, HIPAA, or similarly regulated data is a strong plus

• Comfort designing security controls for LLMs, AI agents, and the data flows around them

• A track record of moving quickly, finding shortcuts, and going to unreasonable lengths to deliver on goals

• High NPS with your former teammates

This is a list of ideal qualifications for this position. If you don't meet every single one of them, you should still consider applying! We’re excited to work with people from underrepresented backgrounds, and we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

Forus is based in New York, with our full team working out of a beautiful and spacious office in SoHo. 
We run as a high-trust environment with high autonomy, which requires that everyone is fully competent and operates in line with our principles:

• Do the math. Be rigorous, assume nothing. Break problems down and reason from the ground up. Stay open to changing your mind.

• Resourceful optimism. Assume problems are solvable. Be audacious. Resist false constraints and push beyond the obvious before deciding.

• Spit it out. Speak directly, invite critique, avoid equivocation. We want right answers, not comfortable ones. All killer, no filler.

• Raise the bar. Hold a high standard for your pace and execution, and elevate the performance of the team around you. Mamba mentality.

• Fight for users. Start with users’ realities, not ours. Resist optimizing for internal convenience over user outcomes.
  

We provide competitive compensation with meaningful equity (for full-time employees). Everyone who joins will be a major contributor to our success, and we reflect this through ownership and pay.
We also provide rich benefits to ensure you can focus on creating impact (for full-time employees):

• Fully covered medical, vision, and dental insurance.

• Memberships for One Medical, Talkspace, Teladoc, and Kindbody.

• Unlimited paid time off (PTO) and 16 weeks of parental leave.

• 401K plan setup, FSA option, commuter benefits, and DashPass.

• Lunch at the office every day and Dinner at the office after 6:30 pm.

Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our company’s size and industry, and are one part of the total compensation package that also includes equity, benefits, and other opportunities at Forus (for full-time employees). Individual pay decisions are ultimately based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, geography, and balancing internal equity.

Forus is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.