Forward‑Deployed AI SOC Engineer

AHEAD; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance

401(k)

Paid company holidays

Paid time off

Parental and caregiver leave

Additional benefits

Job summary

AHEAD is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to deploy, integrate, and operationalize next-generation security and AI capabilities in real-world customer environments. You will bridge engineering, security operations, data, and customer success to translate complex requirements into scalable, production-ready solutions.

The ideal candidate blends hands-on engineering with a deep SOC operations understanding, cloud platform expertise, automation, and customer-facing delivery.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in security engineering, platform engineering, forward deployed engineering, solutions engineering, or related technical roles.
• Hands-on experience implementing and operating modern SOC technologies such as SIEM, XDR, and SOAR.
• Experience deploying cloud-native architectures on at least one major cloud provider such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Strong background in data integration, telemetry pipelines, normalization, and security analytics workflows.
• Experience working directly with customers, internal stakeholders, or cross‑functional delivery teams in implementation-focused environments.
• Ability to lead technical engagements, drive execution, and influence outcomes without direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical lead for deploying and operationalizing security and AI solutions in customer or enterprise environments.
• Translate business, operational, and security requirements into deployable architectures and implementation plans.
• Partner with internal and external stakeholders to ensure solutions are aligned to operational goals, compliance requirements, and long‑term platform strategy.
• Act as a trusted advisor during onboarding, implementation, rollout, and optimization phases.
• Design and implement integrations across SIEM, XDR, SOAR, case management, data platforms, and AI‑enabled tooling.
• Build and configure cloud‑native data ingestion, normalization, and enrichment pipelines for security telemetry.
• Integrate APIs, webhooks, message queues, and automation workflows across identity, endpoint, cloud, network, and application ecosystems.
• Develop reusable deployment patterns, templates, and technical assets to accelerate future implementations.
• Operationalize AI and automation use cases within security workflows, including alert enrichment, triage support, summarization, clustering, playbook selection, and analyst copilots.
• Work with detection engineering and data teams to support implementation of behavioral analytics, anomaly detection, risk scoring, and other AI‑assisted security use cases.
• Help define data requirements, feedback loops, and operational guardrails needed to support effective AI outcomes in production environments.
• Ensure deployed solutions are practical, measurable, and aligned to analyst workflows and response objectives.
• Implement secure and governed automation for investigation and response use cases across heterogeneous environments.
• Support resiliency, observability, performance, and scale requirements for deployed solutions.
• Troubleshoot integration issues, deployment blockers, and production challenges in partnership with platform, cloud, and security teams.
• Improve reliability and maintainability through documentation, testing, monitoring, and standardized engineering practices.
• Collaborate across Security Operations, Security Engineering, Detection Engineering, Data Science, Infrastructure, and product or customer teams.
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to best practices for implementation, delivery, and technical solution design.
• Provide field feedback to influence platform roadmap, product direction, and architectural standards.

Skills

Security engineering

Platform engineering

Forward deployed engineering

Solution engineering

Customer delivery

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

SIEM

XDR

SOAR

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

AHEAD is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to deploy, integrate, and operationalize next-generation security and AI capabilities in real-world customer environments. You will bridge engineering, security operations, data, and customer success to translate complex requirements into scalable, production-ready solutions.

The ideal candidate blends hands-on engineering with a deep SOC operations understanding, cloud platform expertise, automation, and customer-facing delivery.