# Principal Active Defense Engineer

**Company**: Workday
**Location**: Reston, VA
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $184,800 USD - $277,200 USD
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://workday.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Workday/job/USAVAReston/Principal-Active-Defense-Engineer_JR-0109596-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_9e24f61b-bc1

## Description

We are looking for a Principal Active Defense Engineer to join our Active Defense team. As a Principal Active Defense Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how Workday detects threats, and you will be the engineer the team looks to when a problem is ambiguous, spans several systems, or has no obvious owner.

The Active Defense team is a group of highly skilled and dedicated professionals who are passionate about protecting our organization from cyber threats. We source, evaluate, and analyze both internal and external data, providing critical insight to a variety of security and business teams.

Responsibilities:

- Set the technical direction for the detection portfolio and platform

- Be the review authority for infrastructure changes and complex detections

- Lead large initiatives through to live operation

- Build for reuse and advance the detections-as-code lifecycle

- Raise the technical ceiling of the team through mentorship and design review

- Lead how we apply AI-assisted analysis, automation, and agents to detection work

- Own detection quality and drive coverage, fidelity, and noise reduction

- Represent detection engineering across Workday and partner with other teams

- Shape what comes next and evaluate emerging detection approaches

Requirements:

- 10+ years in software, platform, or security engineering

- Significant experience building and operating detection or security capabilities at production scale

- Technical leadership experience as an individual contributor

- Software development expertise in a general-purpose programming language

- Detection platform ownership experience

- AI-assisted engineering judgment experience

- Platform and cloud breadth experience

Nice to have:

- Production engineering discipline experience

- Threat-informed detection experience

- Adaptive detection analytics experience

- Cross-team technical leadership experience

- Program judgment and proven ability to run complex technical projects

- Strong communication skills and ability to present technical information to a non-technical audience

- Continuous learning and enthusiasm for emerging work in security, data science, and machine learning

## Skills

### Required
- Python
- Java
- Kotlin
- Scala
- JavaScript
- Splunk
- Spark
- AI-assisted analysis
- automation tools

### Nice to have
- MITRE ATT&CK
- SIEM platforms
- public cloud environments
- automated testing
- validation
- deployment

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Source: [Apply at workday.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com](https://workday.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Workday/job/USAVAReston/Principal-Active-Defense-Engineer_JR-0109596-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)