A demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering: using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty, while using it responsibly with security-sensitive code (checking AI-generated cryptographic and authentication logic against specs, and never exposing secrets or customer data in prompts). asymmetric encryption, hashing, HMAC, password hashing (bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2, PBKDF2), digital signatures, PKI and X.509 certificates, TLS and mTLS, JWT/JWS/JWE, and key management and rotation, plus the judgment to use vetted libraries rather than writing your own.