Principal Engineer, Security AI Tooling and Automation

TransUnion•Chicago, IL

6d•$168,750 - $281,250•Hybrid

About The Position

Security Forward Deployed Engineering (SFDE) deploys focused engineering effort into priority areas across Cyber Defense. Working across security and engineering, the team brings product context into delivery and helps align security objectives with engineering implementation. SFDE covers Vulnerability Management, AI Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Risk Intelligence. This role is a founding senior engineer in the AI Vulnerability Research and Engineering pod and reports to the SVP, Cyber Defense. The position is hybrid, with responsibilities performed virtually and in person at an assigned TransUnion office at least two days per week. The Principal Engineer builds and maintains agentic security automation and internal tooling, integrates security data sources, and automates remediation workflows. The role embeds automation in CI/CD pipelines and owns production reliability, including observability, alerting, failure handling, and operational health. It also sets technical direction, mentors engineers, contributes to cross-pod architecture decisions, and works closely with engineering teams and senior security and engineering stakeholders.

Requirements

At least 8 years of hands-on experience in security engineering, platform engineering, or software engineering, including a strong security engineering component.
Strong background in API integration, data-pipeline engineering, and building internal developer or operator tooling at production scale.
Working knowledge of security engineering fundamentals, including vulnerability classes, exploit mechanics, and remediation patterns.
Ability to design reliable, observable, and maintainable automation systems; set technical direction; make build-versus-integrate trade-offs; and deliver in a fast-moving embedded team environment.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
Production experience building agentic AI systems or LLM-powered automation frameworks in Python or Go, including tool use, orchestration, and multi-step workflow design.
Experience engineering CI/CD pipelines and implementing automated security enforcement gates in software delivery workflows.
Experience designing and operating production integrations, data connectors, normalization pipelines, observability, alerting, state management, retry logic, and failure handling for automation platforms.
Ability to build and maintain internal security tooling, dashboards, remediation-tracking integrations, and automation systems used by security practitioners and engineering teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience building security tooling or vulnerability-intelligence platforms, including internal tools, dashboards, or automation systems used by security practitioners.
Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks and the engineering challenges of operating LLM-powered workflows reliably in production.
Experience with container and image hardening, infrastructure as code (IaC), or runtime security instrumentation.
Background in open-source security tooling, security-research automation, or exploit-validation tooling.
Experience in financial services.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain the agentic automation framework, including orchestration for tool invocation, state management, retry logic, observability, and failure handling across security workflows.
Develop and own internal security tooling, including vulnerability intelligence interfaces, remediation-tracking integrations, and operator-facing dashboards.
Integrate security data sources through APIs, data connectors, and normalization pipelines to create a coherent, queryable data model.
Automate remediation initiation and tracking by triggering fix workflows, monitoring remediation status, escalating breached SLAs, and validating resolution with minimal manual handoff.
Embed security automation in CI/CD pipelines in partnership with Platform Engineering and DevOps, including automated fix-proposal workflows and pre-production security gates.
Own production reliability of the tooling stack, including observability, alerting, failure handling, and operational health.
Set technical direction for the automation layer, mentor engineers, contribute to cross-pod architecture decisions, and represent tooling and platform capabilities with senior stakeholders.
Work alongside engineering teams, share context early, co-own outcomes, and build trust through delivery, technical depth, and shared accountability.
Adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment and trustworthiness, work safely, communicate respectfully, and safeguard business operations, confidential and proprietary information, and the company’s reputation.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision coverage, with supplemental plan options and eligible dependent coverage.
Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options.
Company-paid basic life and AD&D insurance; optional voluntary life and AD&D coverage.
Short- and long-term disability coverage.
Optional legal plan, pet insurance, and travel accident coverage.
Adoption assistance, fertility planning coverage, caregiver support, Dependent Care FSA, and Care@Work membership.
Up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave, with eligibility for a gradual return.
401(k) with employer match and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
Financial wellness resources and career coaching.
Tuition reimbursement and flexible time off for exempt employees or paid time off for nonexempt employees.
Up to 12 paid holidays per year, commuter benefits, employee discounts, charitable gift matching, and paid volunteer time off.
24/7 access to professional therapy, coaching, emotional well-being programs, guided meditation, and physical, mental, social, and financial wellness resources.
Regular, full-time non-sales positions may be eligible for the annual bonus plan; certain positions may also be eligible for long-term incentives and other payments.