Hi! We're Forerunner.
Stronger, more resilient communities are built by the people inside government and regulated industries who keep critical infrastructure running. But they're working against real headwinds: fragmented data, field crews without the right tools, and high-stakes decisions made without a complete picture.
Forerunner exists to fix that. We build intelligent software that connects the systems these agencies and firms already rely on, fills the gaps those systems can't, and turns fragmented information into decisions and actions that reduce liability, surface revenue, and prevent small problems from becoming emergencies.
About the Role
As a Senior Security & Infrastructure Engineer, you will own the security and compliance posture of our AWS infrastructure end-to-end — from the authorization boundary and continuous monitoring through to the automation that keeps it all running — while driving our FedRAMP authorization forward. You'll act at the intersection of security engineering, infrastructure, and compliance, partnering directly with our compliance lead and engineering team to make security decisions land as defaults rather than review gates.
What you'll do
Own the security and compliance posture of our AWS infrastructure (us-east-1 commercial, targeting Moderate): authorization boundary, KSI evidence, continuous monitoring, and the automation behind all of it
Drive FedRAMP execution alongside our compliance lead: machine-readable evidence in Vanta, control implementation, 3PAO coordination through assessment and Marketplace listing
Harden and modernize production infrastructure: IaC, network segmentation, secrets management, logging and detection in Datadog, incident response
Keep the guardrails from becoming a tax: build compliance into CI/CD and developer workflows rather than bolting it on
Partner directly with engineering (~12 people, two product teams) so security decisions land as defaults, not as review gates
What we're looking for
You've been through a FedRAMP authorization before - Agency or JAB, Moderate or above - and can speak candidly about what actually consumed the time
Deep AWS experience and strong infrastructure-as-code fundamentals
Comfortable owning both the engineering and the paperwork; you can write a control narrative and also fix the Terraform it describes
Experience with SOC 2 / StateRAMP / TX-RAMP, continuous monitoring tooling, and threat modeling
Bonus: Node/TypeScript environments, PostGIS, GovTech or public sector delivery
Why this role
FedRAMP is the gate between our product and the agencies that need it most. You'd be one of the first dedicated security engineering hires, with ownership, scope, supportive infra partners already in place, and a mission where the downstream user is a community trying to best prepare against natural disasters.
What We Offer
Forerunner is an early stage company with an interdisciplinary team. We are motivated by seemingly intractable problems and work hard to support one another.
We're mission-driven. Our mission orients our business strategy and pushes us to work with a sense of urgency. We’re in the weeds - our entire team spends time engaging with our partners in the field to better understand the real-world problems they face.
We're a small team. As a member of our growing team, you will quickly become an invaluable part of our organization and have a meaningful impact on our business and technical direction. We welcome unique perspectives and backgrounds. Your opinion matters and we hope you'll share it.
We build each other up. A team works best when its members are adequately equipped with the tools to tackle the problems they are facing. Forerunner strives to provide adequate feedback and appropriate learning opportunities to help all its team members expand their skills.
We value in-person collaboration. Some of our best work happens when we're solving problems together in the same room, so this role is hybrid and based near one of our offices: New York City, San Francisco, or Portland, Maine.
We want you to be happy and healthy. Forerunner offers competitive compensation, health/vision/dental coverage, a 401k plan, and one expensed lunch per week. We also have a quarterly wellness reimbursement so that you can have flexibility in defining what “health” means to you.
The salary range for this position is $195,000-$220,000. This posting may span more than one career level. Compensation is determined based on a variety of factors, including an individual’s skills, experience, and qualifications.
Forerunner is an equal opportunity employer committed to embracing diversity and the perspectives of individuals from all backgrounds.