Principal Active Defense Engineer

We’re obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we’re shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you’ll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We’re in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you’ll do meaningful work with Workmates who’ve got your back. In return, we’ll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you’ve found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too.

This role is the senior technical anchor for Active Defense. 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 breadth here is real. Our work runs from translating threat intelligence into new detections, through the quality and fidelity of the alerts we hand to incident response, to the detections-as-code pipeline, curated datasets, and CI/CD tooling that all of it depends on. We also serve as the subject matter experts other teams come to for audits, coverage questions, and platform decisions. You will be expected to operate across that whole surface rather than in one corner of it. The engineers who do best in this seat tend to come from a strong software, platform, or data engineering foundation applied to security, rather than from a purely analytical security path.

You will lead large initiatives from concept to production with little direction, and you will decide how we apply AI-assisted analysis, automation, and agents to detection work. This is a team early in its growth, so the standards you set will be adopted broadly and quickly, and raising the technical ceiling of the engineers around you through mentorship, design review, and the standard your own work sets is a core part of the job.

This is a hands-on engineering role rather than a people management role.

Responsibilities:
- Set the technical direction. Own the architecture decisions, detection methodology, and design standards for the detection portfolio and the platform it runs on.
- Be the review authority. Serve as the senior reviewer for infrastructure changes and complex detections, so that design and code review is a fast path for the team rather than a queue.
- Lead large initiatives through to live operation. Take ambiguous problems from concept all the way to running in production, including the validation, documentation, and response playbook that make an alert worth acting on.
- Build for reuse. Advance the detections-as-code lifecycle, CI/CD, validation tooling, and curated datasets, turning one-off solutions into patterns the whole team adopts.
- Raise the technical ceiling of the team. Mentor engineers through design review, code review, and pull request feedback so that judgment and delivery scale beyond any one person.
- Lead how we apply AI. Determine where agents, automation, and generative tooling belong in authoring, validating, and tuning detections, and where they do not.
- Own detection quality. Drive coverage, fidelity, and noise reduction so that the alerts reaching our incident responders are worth their attention.
- Represent detection engineering across Workday. Partner with incident response, threat intelligence, security tooling, audit, and platform teams, and serve as the expert voice on detection coverage and capability.
- Shape what comes next. Evaluate emerging detection approaches, platforms, and vendors, and bring in what measurably improves outcomes.

Basic Qualifications

The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below.  Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here.

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