Senior Adversary Operations Engineer – Purple Team & Innovation

General Motors; Austin Center (MI); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

General Motors is seeking a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer to lead adversary operations, emulations, and tooling development for robust security testing across enterprise environments.

You will design multi-step exercises, validate detections, and coordinate across Detection Engineering and Incident Response teams to improve security outcomes. Candidates should have hands-on offensive security experience and strong communication skills.

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience in cybersecurity operations, adversary emulation, purple teaming, red teaming, threat hunting, or detection engineering.
• Strong understanding of attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures and the ability to translate them into repeatable testing scenarios.
• Experience with endpoint, cloud, network, and logging technologies used to validate detections and visibility gaps across enterprise environments.
• Experience building or using offensive and validation tooling such as payloads, C2 frameworks, automation, scripting, and infrastructure for safe adversary testing.
• Ability to collaborate across verticals and help coordinate actions that improve Cyber Defense outcomes at scale.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to document findings, explain operational risk, and influence detection and response improvements.

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute tactical purple team operations aligned to real adversary tactics, including persistence, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and C2 testing.
• Design and run strategic, multi-step adversary emulation exercises that validate detections, processes, and team response across the enterprise.
• Build repeatable validation workflows using MSV and related tooling to continuously test visibility, logging, detections, and control effectiveness.
• Develop and enhance innovative adversary tooling, including custom C2, payload development, automation, and infrastructure required to support AO operations.
• Partner with Detection Engineering, Incident Response, and other cyber verticals to turn AO findings into improved detections, integrations, documentation, and threat hunting outcomes.
• Support AO innovation priorities across platforms, logging, cloud infrastructure, and cross-team integrations, including AWS, GCP, and Azure-related attack validation and infrastructure setup.
• Help mature AO capability in advanced and emerging areas such as cloud and SaaS tactics, endpoint tactics across multiple operating systems, AI-related tactics, and infrastructure-focused adversary tradecraft.
• Produce clear technical documentation, attribution, findings, and recommendations that feed operational improvements and future exercises.

Skills

Cybersecurity operations

Purple/Red team

Threat hunting

Offensive tooling

Cross-team collaboration

Technical writing

Tools

MSV tooling

C2 frameworks

Automation

Scripting

Cloud tooling

Job description

General Motors is seeking a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer to lead adversary operations, emulations, and tooling development for robust security testing across enterprise environments.

You will design multi-step exercises, validate detections, and coordinate across Detection Engineering and Incident Response teams to improve security outcomes. Candidates should have hands-on offensive security experience and strong communication skills.