Principal AI Security Engineer

Job Summary

Join CDW and help protect delivery of full stack technology solutions and global services for 250K+ customers—including corporate enterprise, government, education, and healthcare industries. You will be on a team dedicated to collaborative delivery of a new global information security strategy, operating model, and objectives to accelerate CDW’s business goals in a secure way.

Your role at CDW is of the utmost importance to the company’s mission, objectives, and reputation. As the Principal AI Security Engineer, you will be the technical authority on keeping AI secure across the enterprise. At the heart of this role is assessment: you'll own how CDW evaluates AI risk before it reaches production, then design and build the controls that close it. You’ll partner across our security teams and platform teams to define the guardrails, identity model, and detection capabilities that let CDW use AI aggressively and securely, whether we build it, buy it, or need to block it.

This is a hands-on principal role. You will set enterprise AI security direction and help build what you design: reference architectures, controls, and tooling. You will also serve as a trusted advisor across CDW, helping senior leaders and AI governance teams make practical, risk-informed decisions as we scale AI adoption.

Your impact: fewer AI-related incidents, faster and safer AI adoption, and security controls that scale with the business.

What you will do

• Own CDW's AI security assessment program. Design and mature the process, criteria, and risk tiers used to approve, restrict, monitor, or block AI use cases, platforms, vendors, and shadow AI.
• Lead security assessments of AI systems, agents, and integrations before and after deployment, and set the security bar other teams build to.
• Partner with the AI Council, AppSec, and platform teams to build assessment findings into AI use case reviews, so risks are found and addressed before deployment.
• Evaluate third-party AI vendors, purchased AI capabilities, and unapproved AI use against CDW's AI security requirements and guardrails.
• Define methods and tools for AI red teaming, including automated adversarial testing, to validate assessment findings and test controls under real attack conditions.
• Assess AI-related controls across CDW's existing security stack, find gaps, and drive root-cause remediation rather than one-off fixes.
• Define and own CDW's enterprise AI security architecture, including standards, reference architectures, and secure design patterns aligned to NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, and MITRE ATLAS.
• Set security requirements across the AI lifecycle, from data handling and model selection through deployment, monitoring, and retirement.
• Define trust boundaries, authorization models, and least privilege for single-agent and multi-agent systems.
• Design end-to-end security for the AI stack, including LLM inference pipelines, AI agents, MCP-based tool orchestration, and agentic workflows.
• Design and deploy guardrails, sandboxes, runtime controls, and AI gateway capabilities, including prompt and response inspection, data loss prevention, rate limiting, and circuit breaking.
• Build or implement ways to track and govern AI identities, including agents, service principals, workload identities, and delegated access, so CDW always knows what access every AI system has.
• Partner with Identity Engineering teams to align AI identities to CDW's enterprise lifecycle, ownership, and least privilege standards.
• Partner with Detection Engineering and Security Operations to build detections, telemetry, and response playbooks for prompt injection, jailbreaks, data leakage, model abuse, and tool misuse.
• Work with engineering, data science, product, and infrastructure teams to build security in from design through production and publish practical guidance that makes the secure path the easy path.
• Present risk assessments, recommendations, and investment priorities to senior leadership and security governance bodies in clear, business-focused terms.
• Mentor security engineers and architects to grow AI security expertise across CDW.

Success in This Role Looks Like

• Every AI use case, platform, and vendor is assessed against consistent, risk-tiered criteria, with clear approve, restrict, monitor, or block decisions.
• Fewer AI-related security incidents, with detections and playbooks in place for faster containment when they happen.
• Teams know what to expect from AI security assessments, and reviews move fast enough that security speeds up AI adoption instead of blocking it.
• Unapproved AI use is visible, and is either brought under governance or blocked.
• Every AI identity and agent has a known owner, defined access, and least privilege.
• Approved AI reference architectures and guardrails that teams adopt by default.
• Clear, data-driven visibility into AI security posture, control gaps, and remediation progress.

What we expect of you

• Bachelors degree and 10+ years in security engineering or security architecture, including hands-on work securing AI/ML systems, or 14+ years of experience in security engineering or security architecture, including hands-on work securing AI/ML systems.
• Proven experience designing and leading security assessments of AI systems, platforms, or vendors, and turning findings into clear, risk-based decisions.
• Hands-on experience securing production AI technologies, including at least one of the following:
  • Deploying AI guardrails or sandboxes
  • Managing AI or agent identities
  • Detecting or mitigating prompt injection
  • Implementing AI security tooling, built or bought
• Experience building or evaluating security for production AI systems, beyond research or theory.
• Solid understanding of how LLMs work, including pretraining, fine-tuning, RLHF, inference, retrieval-augmented generation, and safety alignment, and how each layer can be attacked.
• Experience securing AI platforms and agent frameworks such as Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure AI services, OpenAI or Anthropic tool use, MCP-based integrations, and frameworks such as Semantic Kernel or LangChain.
• Experience securing AI deployments in public cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP), identity and access management, and zero trust principles.
• Proven ability to influence senior leaders and cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• Experience on a security team defending production AI systems at scale, or at a frontier AI lab, a plus.
• Background in Infrastructure, Cloud, Platform, or Corporate Security, Security Operations, or Detection and Response, a plus.
• Software security review, secure SDLC, vulnerability discovery, or offensive security experience, a plus
• Published work, conference talks, CTF results, or production red team work in prompt injection, jailbreak research, or adversarial ML, a plus.
• Experience with AI security posture management, AI gateways, or AI observability platforms, a plus.
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, OSCP, or AI security credentials, a plus.

Pay range: $172,000-240,000 depending on experience and skill set 
Annual bonus target of 15% subject to terms and conditions of plan 
Benefits overview: https://cdw.benefit-info.com/ 
Salary ranges may be subject to geographic differentials  

CDW is committed to being an AI-fluent organization

We’re looking for people who bring curiosity, a learner’s mindset, and a willingness to engage with ever-evolving technology and tools. We value adopting AI as a partner, openness to experimentation, and a shared interest in learning together on AI. Our goal is to create a culture where AI enhances—not replaces—human creativity and decision-making. You don’t need to be an expert today; what matters is your readiness to explore, adapt, and grow with us as we integrate AI responsibly and effectively into our work.

Additionally, CDW is committed to fostering an equitable, transparent, and respectful hiring process for all applicants. During our application process, our goal is to understand your experience, strengths, skills, and qualifications. As an AI forward company, we see AI not just as a tool, but as a catalyst for new ways of thinking, creating, and communicating. We encourage candidates to embrace an AI mindset, one that’s curious, adaptive, and ready to explore what’s possible. We welcome thoughtful use of AI to expand your perspective and elevate how you share your story, while ensuring your application remains rooted in your own background, judgment, and voice.

About Us

CDW is a Fortune 500 technology solutions provider that helps businesses, government, education, and healthcare organizations achieve what’s possible through technology. What makes CDW different isn’t just what we do—it’s how we do it. At CDW we act as one—building trust, speaking candidly, and working together to achieve more. We play to win—focusing on what matters most and delivering for our customers. And we think forward—staying curious, moving fast, and continuously learning. We believe meaningful work happens when people feel supported, heard, and empowered to contribute. That’s why we think of ourselves as coworkers, not just employees—working together to solve complex challenges and deliver real impact for our customers and communities.

As a full‑stack, full‑lifecycle technology partner, CDW brings deep expertise, strong relationships, and broad industry knowledge to help turn ideas into outcomes. When you join CDW, you become part of a collaborative environment where your work matters, your growth is supported, and your contributions help shape what’s next.

Together, we deliver the full promise of what technology can do. Together, we Make Amazing Happen.

CDW is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other basis prohibited by state and local law.