Director of Security for Japan + APAC

About the Hiring Company:

• One of Japan's leading marketing AI startups rapidly growing and expanding overseas across APAC.
• They make data-driven and UI/UX centric AI products for LINE, SMS, and phone calls to help build trust between businesses and consumers.
• By 2030, they aim to be the No.1 marketing AX provider in APAC.
• Offices in Tokyo/Osaka + overseas

About the Role:

• Establish a system for threat modeling and design guardrails for LLM/AI agent permissions, tool execution, and data access.
• Company-wide security policy formulation, roadmap, and improvement 
• Establishing and operating the Security Engineering function, recruiting, training, and evaluating security engineers for a global team.
• Designing and operating vulnerability management processes, and planning and executing internal and external penetration testing.

Attractiveness of this position:

• You will be directly involved in the formation of the organization and creation of rules at a startup preparing for an IPO and rapid APAC expansion.
• Work directly alongside the VPoE and promote security throughout the entire company.
• Protect products used by over 5,000 companies and the users they serve.
• Be at the heart of the AI era - autonomously operating AI agents for security processes.
• Lead a mostly English speaking global security team.

Must Haves:

• Experience as a leader for a security engineering team in a company making software products (3 years or more)
• At least 8+ years of practical security experience.
• Practical experience in AppSec, SAST/SCA, vulnerability management, penetration testing, and both certification, customer audits, and governance such as ISO 27001/SOC 2.
• Knowledge and interest in AI/LLM security - a strong understanding of threats like prompt injections, tool abuse, jailbreaking, etc and securely integrating AI agents to defend against them.
• Fluent in either Japanese/English and able to communicate professionally in the other language.

Preferred Experiences:

• Qualifications such as CISSP, CISM, CCSP, OSCP, GWAPT, and Certified Information Security Specialist (RISS)
• Security leadership within a regulated industry
• Experience working at a startup or a company with over 100 employees
• Led the acquisition and maintenance of certifications such as SOC 2 and PrivacyMark.
• Experience in building incident response systems and detection infrastructure.
• Built security teams and functions from almost scratch (e.g., security leader during the company's founding period, first CISO).