Workday

Cybersecurity Engineer

Workday$130K — $195K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Strong Python skills with production software experience (APIs, services, backends)
  • Hands-on experience building/evaluating LLM/agent systems or AI-assisted development expertise
  • Ability to design and evolve schemas/data contracts and application UIs
  • Knowledge of core cybersecurity practices (identity access, secrets handling)
  • Comfortable owning operational aspects of shipped software (runbooks, eval)

Responsibilities

  • Own development of agent-related applications: harnesses, scaffolds, and UIs
  • Design and evolve schemas/data contracts for consistency across systems
  • Transform ambiguous partner requests into actionable proposals and solutions
  • Build and maintain integrations across security tools and platforms as needed
  • Enhance the team's AI engineering practices, ensuring reliability and efficiency
  • Iterate quickly through prototyping, testing, and shipping learning cycles

Benefits

  • Flexible work schedule allowing 50% in-office time per quarter
  • Opportunities for collaboration in-person and remote
  • Engagement in exciting projects with a high-impact team
  • Growth in cybersecurity expertise through partnership with domain experts
  • Access to a supportive engineering culture emphasizing collaboration and curiosity
Full Job Description
About the Team
Security Automation & Integration Engineering (SecAIE) transforms cybersecurity operations by architecting intelligent automation that turns manual processes into scalable, decision-accelerating systems. We're the engineering excellence partner within Cybersecurity and Trust - building the unified data foundation, intelligent automation, and decision support tools that enable security teams to make precise, data-driven decisions at machine speed.

We partner closely with Security Leadership, Operational Teams, Engineering Teams, and Governance/Risk Teams to deliver platforms that multiply their effectiveness. Our current charter contributes directly to Workday's Active Defense pivot - building the reliable data and platform substrate that lets security teams execute at machine speed and out-adapt AI-driven threats.

We're a small, high-impact team that values curiosity, pragmatism, and collaboration. We believe working solutions beat perfect designs, unified context beats massive datasets, and partner success is our success. Leveraging AI to augment how we do security engineering is an active opportunity for the team, and one we expect this role to help lean into.

About the Role

We're looking for a Cybersecurity Engineer to join SecAIE and take primary ownership of the agent, eval, and application work that Workday's Active Defense charter runs on. You'll spend most of your time engineering the layer partners actually use - eval harnesses, agent scaffolds, schemas, and application UIs on top of security data - so detection, response, and threat-intel teams can move from a vague ask to a working system. This role is ideal for someone who loves turning messy operational problems into clean, reusable software, who can walk into an ambiguous ask and come back with a proposal, and who treats AI tooling as a force multiplier rather than a novelty.

You will bring working knowledge of cybersecurity concepts and best practices from day one - enough to reason about identity and access, secrets handling, and the shape of common security data (vulnerabilities, incidents, identity, threat intel, detections). You will not be expected to be the deepest security specialist in the room; you will partner with domain experts across our security organization and build the agents, eval, and applications that make their work faster, more reliable, and more measurable.

Responsibilities:

- Own agent-adjacent application work: eval harnesses, agent scaffolds, and the UIs that security partners use to inspect and act on results

- Design, build, and evolve schemas and data contracts so agents and humans share the same objects rather than one-off payloads

- Take partner requests from vague to shipped: scope the problem, propose approaches, choose one, and drive it through design, review, rollout, and operational readiness (eval, tracing, runbooks)

- Build and maintain integrations across security tools and enterprise platforms - SOAR, SIEM, vulnerability scanners, ticketing - when the application or agent needs them

- Raise the team's AI-augmented engineering floor: shared skills, reusable scaffolds, a review discipline for AI-generated code, and eval that catches drift

- Iterate quickly: prototype, test, ship, learn, improve - and bring the team with you

About You

You're a curious engineer who owns problems rather than tickets. You're drawn to ambiguous, messy asks and you enjoy learning a domain deeply enough to propose the right solution, not just implement one that was handed to you. You bring high agency: you can move a partner's rough problem statement to a shipped, operational answer without waiting to be told each next step. You're comfortable turning a partner's Slack thread into a written proposal, and comfortable when the answer to "whose ticket is this?" is "nobody's yet - I'll draft one." You know when to escalate and when to just close the loop yourself. You default to reusable components over copy-paste, eval over vibes, and reliable defaults over one-off heroics. You use AI tooling deliberately and can articulate where it accelerates you and where it does not. You communicate clearly, ask good questions, and genuinely enjoy collaborating across teams to solve hard problems.

Basic Qualifications:
  • Strong Python skills with hands-on experience shipping production software (APIs, services, batch jobs, or application backends), including code review, testing, and operational follow-through
  • Hands-on experience building or evaluating LLM / agent systems (harnesses, eval, tracing, or agentic pipelines) or strong software-engineering fundamentals plus demonstrated AI-augmented development (Copilot, coding agents) with a point of view on where they help
  • Comfort designing or evolving schemas / data contracts and application UIs that sit on real data - not mock-only prototypes
  • Working knowledge of core cybersecurity practices - identity and access, secrets handling, secure-by-default configuration, and reasoning over common security data (vulnerabilities, incidents, identity, threat intel) - so you can build for security outcomes.
  • Comfortable owning what you ship (runbooks, basic observability, eval that still runs after you merge)

Other Qualifications:
  • Agent / eval - LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, or similar; LLM-as-judge or offline eval; tracing and observability for agent runs
  • Application / UI - frontend (React or similar) for internal tools; watchlist / dashboard / workflow UIs on security data
  • Security domain - hands-on with security tools or data for triage and investigation (SIEM, vulnerability scanners, identity systems, orchestration platforms such as Tines); curiosity about detection-engineering workflows
  • Data / schema - comfort reasoning about shared schemas or data contracts that span team boundaries, treating what / who / state as a first-class artifact
  • Cloud / platform familiarity - working AWS fluency (enough to ship and operate); IaC (Terraform/Docker) is useful but not the daily job
  • Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces where you help define the solution, not just implement it


Workday Pay Transparency Statement

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.

Primary Location: USA.VA.Reston

Primary Location Base Pay Range: $130,200 USD - $195,400 USD

Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $117,800 USD - $210,000 USD

Additional Considerations:

If performed in Colorado, the pay range for this job is $124,000 - $186,000 USD based on min and max pay range for that role if performed in CO.

The application deadline for this role is the same as the posting end date stated as below:

10/16/2026

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work, we're combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you'll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

About Workday

Workday, Inc. is a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. The Company delivers financial management, human capital management and analytics applications designed for various companies, educational institutions and government agencies. As part of its applications, the Company provides embedded analytics that capture the content and context of everyday business events, facilitating informed decision-making from wherever users are working. Its applications include Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Other Applications. It also provides open, standards-based Web-services application programming interfaces, and pre-built packaged integrations and connectors. Workday, Inc. is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.
Learn more about Workday
Size
15,932 employees
Market Cap
$42.2 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$282.4 million
Founded
2005
5 Year Trend
+26.7%
Revenue
$4.3 billion
NASDAQ

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