AI-Application Security Architect

Why Stifel

Stifel strives for a culture that puts its clients and associates first: a culture where everyone belongs, everyone is welcome, and everyone contributes to the success of our clients, their careers, and the firm as a whole.

Let’s talk about how you can find your place here at Stifel, where success meets success.

What You'll Be Doing

The AI-Application Security Architect is responsible for defining, governing, and advancing the enterprise AI / application security architecture across the organization. This role provides strategic and technical leadership to ensure applications are designed and built securely at scale, aligned with business objectives, regulatory requirements, and evolving threat landscapes. Acting as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership, this role balances risk reduction with development velocity and innovation.

What We're Looking For

• Design and lead the implementation of enterprise-wide AI / application security strategies, policies, standards, and reference architectures aligned with business objectives, regulatory requirements, and industry best practices.

• Partner closely with software engineering, platform, and DevOps teams to embed security throughout the SDLC, promoting a secure-by-design culture and enabling scalable, automated security controls.

• Lead and oversee AI / application architecture reviews, threat modeling exercises, and design risk assessments to proactively identify and mitigate security risks.

• Define, validate, and prototype security architecture patterns through hands-on evaluations, proof-of-concepts (POCs), and technical deep dives, ensuring proposed controls are practical and effective.

• Establish and maintain secure design patterns and reference architectures for modern application stacks, including AI, cloud-native, microservices, APIs, and event-driven systems.

• Define and govern the integration application security tooling (SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets scanning, CI/CD controls) to improve coverage, consistency, and developer adoption.

• Develop and maintain AI / application security metrics and KPIs to measure program maturity, communicate risk posture to leadership, and drive continuous improvement.

• Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) and escalation point for complex AI / application security design decisions, risk exceptions, and non-standard architectures.

• Establish and enforce AI / application security architecture governance, including design review checkpoints, standards enforcement, and defined escalation paths for non-compliant designs.

• Collaborate with enterprise architecture, cloud security, infrastructure, and GRC teams to ensure application security controls are aligned across platforms and technologies.