AI & Automation Engineer

Role Summary
The Senior AI Engineer leads technical design and delivery of AI automation across multiple Security Operations Center (SOC) workflows and services. You will remain hands-on while shaping technical approach, resolving ambiguous requirements, and building capabilities other engineers can reuse. You will partner across teams to improve investigation quality and response time and establish engineering standards.

What You Will Do

• Lead complex initiatives spanning diverse security services teams; resolve design tradeoffs and implement critical components using large language models (LLMs), agents, and retrieval pipelines.

• Define reusable architecture for agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and tool integrations; choose deterministic or model-driven approaches based on evidence, risk, and cost.

• Establish evaluation methods and release criteria across workflows, covering factual accuracy, reliability, false positives, and regressions against validated evidence.

• Design consistent controls for least-privilege access, sensitive data, prompt injection, output validation, and analyst approval of high-impact response actions.

• Lead SIEM, SOAR, XDR/EDR, threat intelligence, and case management integration design; address scale, API failures, and dependencies across services.

• Improve shared Python components, testing, CI/CD, observability, and rollback practices; lead design reviews and coach engineers on difficult implementation decisions.

• Own reliability and measurable outcomes across related workflows, using investigation quality, analyst time saved, success rates, latency, and cost to guide improvements.

• Shape priorities with Security Operations, Threat Research, Data Science, and DevOps; coordinate technical dependencies, resolve production issues, and document architecture and operating standards.

What You Will Bring

• 7+ years building production software, including 2+ years with LLMs, agents, or applied ML; 1+ year in or alongside a SOC or security team.

• Deep Python and API engineering skills; experience evaluating providers such as OpenAI or Anthropic and open-source models for production use.

• A record of leading architecture and delivery across multiple workflows or services, with reusable designs adopted by other engineers.

• Experience setting AI evaluation and release criteria, diagnosing systemic failure modes, and balancing quality, security, latency, and cost.

• Strong security operations knowledge and experience designing secure integrations, evidence handling, and appropriate analyst oversight for automated response.

• Experience designing and operating distributed or event-driven cloud services, including testing, CI/CD, observability, resilience, and production of incident resolution.

• Ability to turn ambiguous needs into technical plans, influence decisions across teams, and coach senior engineers while remaining hands-on.

• Experience with SQL, Taegis, Sigma detection rules, or mapping detections to MITRE ATT&CK.

• Experience with vector databases, hybrid retrieval, model fine-tuning, or agent orchestration frameworks.

• Background in incident response, network traffic analysis, or Windows event log analysis.

• Experience with containerized or event-driven services, or open-source contributions in security or ML tooling.

What does remote mean at Sophos?
Sophos supports flexible ways of working, with many roles offered remotely and others working in a hybrid model. For remote roles, you may work remotely within the location specified in the job posting. Candidates must reside in and be authorized to work in that location. Our teams collaborate across locations and time zones, using technology to stay connected and deliver results.

Our Commitment To You

Sophos welcomes applicants with diverse experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds. We believe great ideas come from different ways of thinking, and we are committed to building a workplace where people can contribute, grow, and succeed.

We evaluate all candidates based on job-related skills, qualifications, and experience, and are committed to providing equal employment opportunities consistent with applicable laws and regulations.

If you require a reasonable accommodation during any stage of the recruitment process, please let your recruiter know. Any information shared will be used only to evaluate and provide the requested accommodation.