Lead Agentic AI Security Engineer

BioSpace; North Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

AbbVie seeks a hands-on senior IC to architect and ship autonomous AI agent systems for security operations, spanning detection, response, and risk assessment. You will define approaches, build proofs of concept, and harden them for production in high-stakes environments.

This role requires deep security/AI expertise, experience with agentic tools, and the ability to guide technical standards while mentoring others. Expect to contribute across security policy and tooling in a fast-paced setting.

Qualifications

• Required: Bachelor's Degree with 9 years’ experience; Master's Degree with 8 years’ experience; PhD with 4 years’ experience.
• Respective years of experience in cybersecurity, security engineering, or security research with hands-on depth.
• Strong software engineering skills—produce production systems, not just prototypes. Python required; other languages a plus.
• Deep expertise in at least two: security operations, application security, threat intelligence, vulnerability research, detection engineering, offensive security, cloud security.
• Demonstrated experience building AI agents and AI/ML-powered security tools or automation at scale.
• Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Aider, etc.) as part of daily development.
• Track record of original technical work—published research, open-source tooling, conference presentations, or equivalent.
• Ability to work at the intersection of security and AI and apply AI to security problems.
• Experience developing technical standards, frameworks, or guidance that others adopted.
• Strong written and verbal communication to explain concepts to engineers and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build AI agent systems for security operations—autonomous detection, investigation, response, threat hunting, vulnerability analysis, and risk assessment.
• Tackle high-complexity problems: adversarial robustness, secure agent-to-agent communication, guardrails for autonomous decisions.
• Develop frameworks, tooling, and patterns for secure, reliable agentic AI systems—then use them yourself.
• Conduct original research and experiments on agentic AI for offensive/defensive security; translate findings into code.
• Build proof-of-concept exploits and adversarial tests to identify failures and guide defensive design.
• Develop and publish technical guidance and policy for agentic AI security grounded in systems you built and tested.
• Author security position papers on emerging technologies to shape organizational strategy.
• Serve as SME and driver of AI Cybersecurity Maturity program across security domains.
• Integrate LLMs, custom models, and security tooling into agent architectures.
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities and determine applicability to security problems.
• Set technical direction for agent development practices, evaluation, testing, and deployment.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews and technical leadership.

Skills

Security engineering

AI/ML security

Agentic systems

Threat intelligence

Cloud security

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree with 9 years' experience

Master's degree with 8 years' experience

PhD with 4 years' experience

Tools

Python

Claude Code

GitHub Copilot

Job description

AbbVie seeks a hands-on senior IC to architect and ship autonomous AI agent systems for security operations, spanning detection, response, and risk assessment. You will define approaches, build proofs of concept, and harden them for production in high-stakes environments.

This role requires deep security/AI expertise, experience with agentic tools, and the ability to guide technical standards while mentoring others. Expect to contribute across security policy and tooling in a fast-paced setting.