Offensive Security Lead

The Role:

SoFi's Cyber Defense organization is looking for an Offensive Security Lead to mature and grow our Penetration Testing and Red Team functions. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who has spent years both doing the work and building the program around it — someone equally comfortable running a red team engagement against a critical banking platform and designing the operating model that lets a small team of offensive operators keep pace with a fast-growing fintech.

A defining part of this role is modernizing how the team scales. We're looking for a leader who has already built and implemented AI-assisted penetration testing and red teaming programs — using AI tooling to accelerate reconnaissance, exploit development, attack-path analysis, and reporting — and who can bring that experience to bear on the program. 

You'll own the strategy, staffing, tooling, and execution quality of both disciplines, report into Cyber Defense leadership, and act as a trusted advisor to engineering, product, and risk partners across the company.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead and unify Penetration Testing and Red Team into a single, cohesive Offensive Security function — shared standards, shared tradecraft, shared reporting, distinct missions.

• Set and execute the offensive security roadmap, aligning testing scope and cadence to SoFi's risk profile, regulatory obligations, and the pace of product and platform change in the company.

• Build and scale AI-augmented offensive security capabilities — design and implement tooling and workflows (AI-assisted recon, vulnerability triage, exploit chaining, purple-team simulation, report generation) that increase the team's coverage and throughput without sacrificing depth or tradecraft.

• Personally lead and contribute to engagements where needed — network, application, cloud, and AI pentests; adversary emulation and full-scope red team operations — staying technically credible with the team you lead.

• Manage and develop the team: hire, coach, mentor, and grow a mix of penetration testers and red team operators; build clear career paths between the two disciplines and into leadership or other disciplines.

• Own program metrics and maturity: define KPIs for coverage, finding severity and remediation velocity, engagement quality, and program ROI; report progress to senior leadership and risk committees.

• Partner cross-functionally with Vulnerability Management, SOC/Incident Response, Application Security, and engineering teams to ensure offensive findings drive real remediation and inform detection engineering.

• Manage external partnerships — third-party pentest and red team tooling and/or execution vendors, — including scoping, quality oversight, and budget.

• Represent Offensive Security in audits, regulatory exams, and executive briefings, translating technical risk into business risk clearly and credibly.

What You’ll Need:

• 8+ years in offensive security, with demonstrated hands-on experience in both penetration testing and red team/adversary emulation — not just one discipline.

• 2+ years directly managing or leading offensive security teams, ideally within a regulated industry (financial services, fintech, healthcare, or similar).

• Proven experience designing and implementing AI-led or AI-assisted offensive security programs — you can speak concretely to what you built, what tooling/models you used, what scaled and what didn't, and how it changed team output.

• Deep technical fluency across network, web/application, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), and mobile attack surfaces, plus familiarity with adversary emulation frameworks (e.g., MITRE ATT&CK) and C2 tooling.

• Track record of building programs from the ground up or maturing existing ones — process, tooling, metrics, and team structure, not just individual engagements.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfort presenting findings and program strategy to engineering leaders, risk teams, and executives.

• Experience operating in a highly regulated environment and working with auditors/examiners is a strong plus.

• Relevant certifications (OSCP, OSCE, OSEP, GPEN, GXPN, CRTO, or equivalent demonstrated experience) preferred but not required in lieu of strong hands-on track record.