Sr. Cyber Security Engineer - Automation

Versant•Englewood Cliffs, NJ

About The Position

The Senior Automation Security Engineer designs and delivers scalable automation that strengthens the organization’s security posture and engineering velocity. This role combines strong Python engineering with deep working knowledge of GitHub/GitHub Actions, Terraform, and AWS. The engineer leads secure automation patterns, enables disciplined internal use of AI tools, and builds production-quality agentic workflows with appropriate governance, observability, and human control.

Requirements

Strong Python software engineering skills, including API integration, testing, packaging, error handling, and production troubleshooting.
Hands-on expertise with GitHub and GitHub Actions, including reusable workflows, OIDC, permissions, secure secrets use, and CI/CD controls.
Strong Terraform experience: modules, state, plans, code review, testing, and policy or guardrail implementation.
Deep practical understanding of AWS security and cloud architecture, especially IAM, network boundaries, logging, encryption, and serverless/container services.
Experience designing automation that is reliable, observable, least-privileged, and safe to roll out.
Demonstrated ability to lead design discussions, review code, and guide work across teams.
Working knowledge of AI/LLM application risks and the engineering controls needed for safe agentic automation.

Nice To Haves

Experience with security orchestration, SIEM/SOAR, detection engineering, incident response, or vulnerability-management automation.
Experience with policy-as-code and cloud security tools such as OPA, Checkov, tfsec, Trivy, AWS Config, Security Hub, or GuardDuty.
Hands-on delivery with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, MCP, RAG, evaluation frameworks, or enterprise AI platforms.
AWS Security Specialty, AWS DevOps Engineer, CISSP, Security+, or comparable certification.
Experience operating workloads with Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, or EKS.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate reusable Python services, libraries, CLIs, and integrations that automate security controls and operational workflows.
Establish engineering standards for reliability, testing, observability, secrets handling, access control, and lifecycle ownership of automations.
Automate high-value workflows such as identity and access reviews, cloud configuration remediation, evidence collection, security findings enrichment, exception management, and incident response orchestration.
Own and improve GitHub Actions patterns for secure CI/CD, including reusable workflows, OIDC-based cloud access, artifact controls, approvals, and policy checks.
Integrate code scanning, dependency controls, secrets detection, IaC scanning, tests, and release gates into engineering workflows without unnecessary delivery friction.
Review workflow and repository permissions, third-party actions, supply-chain risks, and runner security; drive pragmatic remediation.
Design and maintain Terraform modules, guardrails, and policy-as-code controls for AWS environments.
Automate secure AWS configuration across IAM, Organizations, VPC, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, S3, KMS, Lambda, ECS/EKS, Secrets Manager, and related services.
Build safe detection and remediation flows using least privilege, change controls, dry runs, rollback approaches, and audit-ready logging.
Develop governed internal AI automations and agents that use approved models, tools, knowledge sources, and identity boundaries.
Design agent workflows with explicit tool scopes, input validation, prompt-injection defenses, audit logs, evaluation cases, and human-in-the-loop approvals for material actions.
Create reusable patterns for tool calling, retrieval/RAG, workflow orchestration, context handling, and secure deployment; mentor teams on their use.
Champion responsible AI-assisted or “vibe coding” practices: clear review accountability, source validation, secure code patterns, and protection of internal data.
Translate security and operational needs into an automation roadmap, architecture, and measurable outcomes.
Lead technical design reviews, mentor junior engineers, and partner with platform, cloud, SOC, and application teams.
Communicate tradeoffs and risk clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.