Principal Security Engineer

Verizon • Ashburn, VA

10h • Hybrid

About The Position

When you join Verizon You want more out of a career. A place to share your ideas freely — even if they’re daring or different. Where the true you can learn, grow, and thrive. At Verizon, we power and empower how people live, work and play by connecting them to what brings them joy. We do what we love — driving innovation, creativity, and impact in the world. Our V Team is a community of people who anticipate, lead, and believe that listening is where learning begins. In crisis and in celebration, we come together — lifting our communities and building trust in how we show up, everywhere & always. Want in? Join the #VTeamLife. What you’ll be doing... The GN&T Network Security team is looking for a highly motivated and experienced Principal Security Engineer with expertise in security detections, EDR systems and data engineering to join the Network Security Foundational team. Successful candidates will be able to apply their expertise in the design, and implementation of cutting-edge and mission critical security detections used to detect and mitigate sophisticated threats facing Verizon and our customers. The Network Intelligence infrastructure consists of several large scale compute and storage clusters that are used to analyze petabyte scale network and security event data sets for anomalous and malicious network activity. As a senior technical lead on our team, you won't just be monitoring dashboards; you will be the architect of our detection strategy and the primary defender of our infrastructure and global network. In this role, you will be an owner of our Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) ecosystem and our SIEM visibility. You will be expected to anticipate how an adversary thinks, build the systems to catch them, and lead the technical discussions when high-stakes incidents occur.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related field or four or more years of work experience.
• Six or more years of relevant experience required, demonstrated through one or a combination of work and/or military experience, or specialized training.
• Principal-Level Cybersecurity Foundations: A "first-principles" understanding of cybersecurity, from memory corruption and buffer overflows to global identity-based attacks.
• Endpoint Expertise: Deep experience managing EDR/XDR detections at scale. You should be comfortable pivoting from a high-level alert to raw process trees and memory strings to validate a threat.
• The Linux Specialist: You are intimately familiar with the Linux boot process, system, PAM, and how attackers leverage them for persistence. You can process audited logs and quickly find the anomaly.
• Network Intelligence: Advanced knowledge of networking protocols (BGP, TLS/SSL, DNS).
• Programming/Scripting: Expert knowledge in developing scripts and writing programs (e.g. Python) to automate tasks and solve problems.
• Data Engineering: Advanced knowledge of database systems, the relational database model and hands-on expertise working with data.
• Extendive experience in a dedicated security engineering or incident response role, with a track record of defending enterprise-scale environments.
• Strong analytical skills and attention to detail with a proven track record of managing and delivering results.
• Leadership experience as a subject matter expert with effective written, interpersonal, and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

• Splunk Proficiency: Expert-level knowledge of Splunk SPL. You should be capable of building custom macros, data models, and automated lookups to streamline investigations.
• Attack & Mitigation Knowledge: You don't just know what a "Golden Ticket" or "Living off the Land" attack is; you know exactly what telemetry is required to block or detect it.
• Preferred Tools: Hands-on experience with CrowdStrike Falcon (including RTR and Fusion) and Splunk ES is highly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Detection Engineering: Design, build, and optimize advanced security detections within the Splunk platform. You will move beyond basic alerts to create high-fidelity, risk-based alerting (RBA) models that identify complex attack patterns.
• EDR Strategy & Management: Serve as the global SME for our CrowdStrike environment. This includes managing large-scale deployments, tuning prevention policies, and performing deep-dive forensic analysis on endpoint telemetry.
• Linux Security Mastery: You will work primarily on linux-based systems developing detections and investigating EDR-based alerts and detections.
• Data Engineering: Analyze, normalize and utilize data to identify certain security patterns and properties.
• Scripting and Coding: Build small programs and scripts to solve problems and automate tasks to allow the team to move faster and be more efficient.

Benefits

• Our benefits are designed to help you move forward in your career, and in areas of your life outside of Verizon. From health and wellness benefit options including: medical, dental, vision, short and long term disability, basic life insurance, supplemental life insurance, AD&D insurance, identity theft protection, pet insurance and group home & auto insurance.
• We also offer a matched 401(k) savings plan, up to 8 company paid holidays per year and up to 6 personal days per year, paid parental leave, adoption assistance and tuition assistance, plus other incentives, we’ve got you covered with our award-winning total rewards package.
• Depending on the role, employees have the opportunity to receive compensation in the form of premium pay such as overtime, shift differential, holiday pay, allowances, etc.
• Newly hired employees receive up to 15 days of vacation per year, which grows with additional service.
• The salary will vary depending on your location and confirmed job-related skills and experience.
• This is an incentive based position with the potential to earn more.
• For part-time roles, your compensation will be adjusted to reflect your hours.
• The annual salary range for the location(s) listed on this job requisition based on a full-time schedule is: $120,500.00 - $231,000.00.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level