Principal Active Defense Engineer (Cybersecurity)

Location: Reston, Virginia, USA. Flex Work requires spending at least 50% of each quarter in the office or in the field with customers, prospects, or partners.

Annual base salary: $184,800–$277,200 for the primary location; $167,200–$300,000 for additional US locations.

Company

hirify.global is a Fortune 500 company and AI platform for managing people, money, and agents.

What you will do

• Set architecture, detection methodology, and design standards for the active defense portfolio and its platform.
• Review complex detections and infrastructure changes as the senior technical authority.
• Lead ambiguous, multi-system initiatives from concept through production, including validation, documentation, and response playbooks.
• Advance detections-as-code, CI/CD, automated validation, and curated datasets to create reusable engineering patterns.
• Determine where AI agents, automation, and generative tooling should be used in detection authoring, validation, and tuning.
• Drive detection coverage, fidelity, and noise reduction while partnering with incident response, threat intelligence, audit, tooling, and platform teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software, platform, or security engineering experience, including production-scale detection or security capabilities.
• Experience setting technical direction and leading complex initiatives as an individual contributor without managing people.
• Strong software development skills in a general-purpose language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Scala, or JavaScript.
• Experience architecting a detections-as-code pipeline, detection platform, or production data pipeline.
• Experience applying generative AI, conversational AI, or AI agents to security engineering, plus experience with SIEM platforms such as Splunk and public cloud environments.
• Experience with automated testing and deployment, threat-informed detection using MITRE ATT&CK or incident learnings, adaptive detection analytics, and cross-team technical communication.

Nice to have

• SANS or CISSP certifications or related training.
• Experience with emerging security, data science, and machine learning approaches.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible work combining in-person time with remote work.
• At least 50% of each quarter is spent in the office or in the field, depending on the role.
• Opportunities for continuous learning, industry conferences, and security training.
• Potential eligibility for the hirify.global Bonus Plan or role-specific bonus and annual refresh stock grants.
• Comprehensive benefits and reasonable accommodations during the hiring process.