Endpoint Security Engineer

PlanIT Group; Reston, Northern (VA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

PlanIT Group in Reston, VA seeks an Endpoint Security Engineer to design, deploy, and operationalize EDR/XDR capabilities across a large, distributed fleet. You will work with EUC devices, on-premises servers, and multi-cloud workloads to maintain a strong security posture while minimizing business disruption.

You will partner with application owners and SOC teams, handle advanced forensics, threat hunting, and automated remediation, and contribute to policy tuning and evidence-based reporting.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in technical cybersecurity engineering or infrastructure security roles.
• 3–5 years engineering and administering EDR/XDR platforms across 50k+ endpoints.
• Experience supporting active SOC investigations and cross-functional collaboration with system owners.
• Bachelor's degree in CS, Cybersecurity, Information Systems (or 4 extra years of related experience).
• GIAC/CISSP or vendor credentials are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain NGAV and EDR/XDR agents across endpoints.
• Implement protections against zero-day malware, LOTLBs, fileless execution, credential dumping.
• Partner with application owners to minimize false positives and downtime.
• Serve as escalation lead for SOC analysts and IT operations during high-severity events.
• Extend security to multi-cloud workloads and private data centers.
• Measure and validate control efficacy with automated attack simulations and telemetry monitoring.

Skills

EDR/XDR Engineering

Behavioral Analysis & Threat Hunting

Hybrid Infrastructure & OS Internals

Automation & Scripting

AI/ML in Security

Education

Bachelor's degree (CS/Cybersecurity/IS)

Tools

CrowdStrike Falcon

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

SentinelOne

Job description

Reston, VA Contract On-Site Flexibility/Remote: 100%

Endpoint Security Engineer

As an Endpoint Security Engineer, you will design, deploy, and operationalize active, behavior-based endpoint detection and response (EDR/XDR) capabilities across one of the largest private operational fleets in North America. Protecting an enterprise comprising 600,000+ employees and 30,000+ physical sites, you will maintain rigorous security posture across traditional end-user computing (EUC) devices (laptop, desktop, mobile devices & retail terminals), on-premise physical & virtual servers & containerized workloads, and dynamic multi-cloud workloads (AWS, Azure, GCP).

In this role, you will balance proactive protection with business continuity—partnering directly with end-users and application owners to tune policies and eliminate operational friction, while providing tier-3/tier-4 technical escalations to Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts and IT Operations staff during active investigations.

Duties and Responsibilities

Fleet-Wide Behavioral Defense & Control Engineering

Engineer, deploy, and maintain Next-Gen Antivirus (NGAV) and Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR/XDR) agents (e.g., CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, SentinelOne) across hundreds of thousands of heterogeneous endpoints.

Implement active behavioral protections against zero-day malware, living-off-the-land binaries (LotLBs), fileless execution, and credential dumping.

Application Owner & End-User Engagement (Business Impact Management)

Serve as the primary technical partner to application owners and business units, establishing baseline behavior profiles to minimize false positives, performance degradation, or operational downtime across critical retail, logistics, and supply chain applications.

Manage allowlisting, exception workflows, and phased ring deployments (canary/pilot/production) to ensure silent, high-efficacy protection without disrupting day-to-day warehouse or logistics operations.

SOC & IT Operations Event Investigation Support

Act as endpoint security escalation lead for SOC analysts during high-severity threat detection and response events.

Act as endpoint operations escalation lead for IT administrators during high-impact event investigation and remediation efforts.

Perform advanced host forensics, process-tree reconstruction, memory analysis, and script-based live remediation (e.g., host isolation, automated artifact collection, registry rollbacks).

Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Workload Protection

Extend endpoint security standards across private data center virtualization layers (VMware/Nutanix) and episodic multi-cloud infrastructure (EC2, Azure VMs, Compute Engine, containerized hosts).

Control Efficacy & Continuous Validation

Continuously measure and test security control efficacy using automated attack simulation (Client) tools and Purple Team exercises.

Track and report on agent health, tamper-resistance, telemetry pipeline integrity, and coverage metrics aligned with enterprise asset management systems.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs)

Technical Skills

EDR/XDR Engineering: Expert-level proficiency administering enterprise-scale endpoint platforms across Windows, macOS, Linux distributions, and container runtime environments.

Behavioral Analysis & Threat Hunting: Deep mastery of process lineage, behavioral IOAs (Indicators of Attack), Sysmon telemetry, and detection authoring using query languages such as SQL, KQL (Kusto Query Language), Splunk SPL, or YARA.

Hybrid Infrastructure & OS Internals: Deep understanding of Windows/Linux kernel architectures, API hooking, hypervisor isolation, and multi-cloud workload identity integrations.

Automation & Scripting: Strong programming/scripting abilities in PowerShell, Python, or Bash to orchestrate fleet-wide remediations and automate policy compliance at scale.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: Fluency applying appropriate AI/ML technologies and analytics platforms (Splunk, Databricks, Elastic) to streamline and/or automate activities including but not limited to research, developing documentation, and supporting development of executive communications. Fluency applying appropriate AI/ML technologies to automate security activities to improve timeliness or full automation of event response activities.

Abilities & Core Competencies

Stakeholder Empathy & Impact Analysis

Proven ability to balance stringent security controls with business operational velocity, ensuring minimal disruption to end-user productivity and mission-critical COTS/proprietary software.

Crisis Leadership & Composure: Capable of methodically triaging active enterprise threats under pressure and articulating complex host-based attacks to executive leadership.

Operational Scale Management: Mindset geared toward 'Infrastructure-as-Code' and policy automation rather than manual device-by-device intervention.

Required Education and Experience Requirements

Experience: * 7+ years of progressive experience in technical cybersecurity engineering or infrastructure security roles.

At least 3–5 years directly engineering and administering enterprise-grade EDR/XDR platforms across 50,000+ endpoints in a distributed hybrid environment.

Demonstrated track record supporting active SOC investigations and collaborating cross-functionally with system owners in large-scale enterprise environments.

Education: *Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems. If the individual's degree is not in the applicable field then four additional years of related experience is required.

Preferred Certifications

• GIAC Certified Enterprise Defender (GCED), GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH), or GCFA (Forensic Analyst).
• CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional).
• Specialized Vendor Engineering Credentials (e.g., CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator/Hunter, Microsoft Certified: Security Operations Analyst Associate / SC-200).

Additional Provisions

• Pass a client mandated clearance process to include drug screening, criminal history check and credit check.
• Once candidate's resume is approved and interview passed, the agency is responsible for providing drug screening. Failure to submit the drug screening results will delay the security clearance process.
• If a candidate is given an interim clearance, continuation of employment is then based on the candidate receiving a sensitive clearance.
• All candidates must be a US Citizen or permanent status Green Card holder.
• Cannot have more than 6 months travel outside the United States within the last five years. Military Service excluded. (Exception does not include military family members).
• All overtime must be pre-approved in writing by the client manager or his/her designated representative.
• Agency will not be reimbursed for overtime charges without previous written authorization. Authorized overtime will be reimbursed at straight time.
• The enforced dress code is business casual, i.e., collared shirt with slacks for men, no skirts above the knee for women.