Staff Application Security Engineer

Vestwell · New York, NY | Austin, TX | King of Prussia, PA | Scottsdale, AZ

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • Posted 2026-11-05
  • Confirmed live on 10 November 2026

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Job description

Vestwell is the financial technology company powering the new savings economy. The New York City-based fintech platform redefines how people save for the critical aspects of life across retirement, education, and healthcare savings needs. Today, Vestwell enables over 790,000 businesses and more than 2.75 million active savers, with over $57 billion in assets saved across all 50 United States.

Vestwell offers a range of products, including workplace-delivered retirement plans, employer-offered student loan repayment benefits, and various savings accounts for education, emergencies, and individuals with disabilities.

Vestwell's platform serves a diverse clientele, including financial advisers, employers, third-party administrators, financial institutions, payroll providers, government agencies, and individual savers. To learn more, visit vestwell.com

Who Are We Looking For?

We are looking for a Staff Application Security Engineer to help secure the applications and identity integrations that power our products. This role will focus on analyzing and protecting our NestJS applications, strengthening application security practices across the software development lifecycle, and owning the security of our identity capabilities as both an identity provider (IdP) and a relying party (RP) in OIDC integrations and internal application usage.

You will work closely with software engineering, platform, infrastructure, and product teams to identify risk early, design practical mitigations, and make secure-by-default development easier. The ideal candidate combines strong hands-on application security skills with deep knowledge of modern authentication and authorization protocols.

What Will You Be Doing?

• Analyze NestJS and TypeScript applications for authentication, authorization, input validation, injection, session, API, business-logic, and data-protection vulnerabilities.

• Establish and evolve secure development patterns for NestJS, including guards, interceptors, middleware, decorators, validation, error handling, logging, configuration, and dependency management.

• Own or contribute to the security architecture of our OIDC integrations and identity platform capabilities when we operate as:

• An identity provider, including authorization, token, user-info, discovery, key-set, and logout endpoints.

• A relying party, including client registration, redirect handling, authorization-code flows, token exchange, session establishment, and logout.

• Design, review, and assess OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect flows, including authorization code with PKCE, refresh tokens, client authentication, scopes, consent, state, nonce, redirect URI validation, token lifetimes, and key rotation.

• Help define and enforce authorization models using RBAC and, where appropriate, claims-based or policy-based access control.

• Review access-control boundaries across services, APIs, tenants, users, roles, permissions, and administrative functions.

• Lead or participate in threat modeling, security design reviews, architecture reviews, and secure code reviews.

• Build security requirements, reusable libraries, reference implementations, and developer guidance that reduce recurring risk.

• Improve security testing and detection through SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, secret scanning, API testing, dependency monitoring, and targeted security testing.

• Partner with engineering teams to remediate vulnerabilities, prioritize findings by exploitability and business impact, and verify fixes.

• Monitor relevant application and identity security signals, support incident investigations, and contribute to playbooks for account takeover, token compromise, authorization bypass, credential abuse, and related events.

• Help maintain security documentation, standards, risk exceptions, and evidence needed for audits and customer assurance.

• Stay current on application security, identity, OAuth/OIDC, browser security, API security, cloud security, and emerging attack techniques.

Requirements

The Necessities

• Professional experience in application security, product security, software engineering, or a closely related discipline.

• Strong experience securing Node.js and TypeScript applications; hands-on experience with NestJS is required or highly preferred.

• Deep understanding of OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, including common implementation pitfalls and secure deployment patterns.

• Practical experience with both IdP and RP implementations, integrations, or security assessments.

• Strong understanding of authentication and authorization concepts, including RBAC, least privilege, separation of duties, claims, scopes, permissions, sessions, tokens, and service-to-service access.

• Ability to review code and architecture across APIs, web applications, background jobs, and distributed services.

• Experience with web and API security risks, including OWASP Top 10, OWASP API Security Top 10, broken access control, SSRF, injec

Prepare for the interview

Nothing collected for this employer yet. The Blind 75 is what technical screens draw from; practice it here, with a coach, in Java or Python.

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