Sr Active Defense Engineer

Workday•Reston, VA

10d•$144,400 - $258,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Your work days are brighter here. 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. About the Team Our Active Defense team is a group of highly skilled and dedicated professionals who are passionate about protecting our organization from cyber threats. We source, evaluate, and analyze both internal and external data, providing critical insight to a variety of security and business teams. We use emerging and relevant intelligence to test our defenses rapidly. We perform detailed analysis while meeting the challenge to scale to the business' needs. We are a core function of the overall Cyber Defense organization at Workday that helps keep the company and its customer data safe every day. Our team members have a strong background in cybersecurity, data analysis, AI and machine learning, offensive security and detection engineering. We use innovative tools and technologies to analyze and visualize data, including Splunk, Spark, Python, and AI-assisted analysis and automation tools. We value teamwork and collaborate closely with other security teams to ensure that our organization stays ahead of emerging cyber threats. About the Role As a member of the Active Defense team, you will get an opportunity to collaborate with a large cross-section of teams across Workday to understand the threat landscape, execute threat hunting and offensive security exercises and discover potential vulnerabilities. You will test detection coverage, perform gap analysis and then use this information to develop and refine alerting logic. You will also help develop adaptive and AI-assisted detection and response capabilities.

Requirements

8+ years of proven abilities in one or more of: incident response, intelligence analysis, vulnerability assessment, security engineering or security operations
Experience researching cybersecurity threats and creating security solutions
Experience using AI-based discovery and exploit creation tools to mimic adversary capabilities.
Experience in a general-purpose programming language like Python, Java, Kotlin, Scala, or JavaScript

Nice To Haves

Experience responding to cybersecurity incidents and helping to mitigate threats
Experience executing red team engagements and bypassing security controls
Experience reverse engineering malware, suspicious code and vulnerabilities
Experience developing or applying agents, automation, or workflow orchestration to create or improve detection and response workflows
Enthusiastic about new emerging topics in security/intelligence, data science and/or machine learning
Dedication to maintain domain proficiency and a professional network with our partners and other interest groups
Strong communication skills and an ability to present technical information to a non-technical audience