Senior AI Security Engineer — Threat-Driven Defender

EY; Birmingham (AL); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical and dental coverage

Pension and 401(k) plans

Flexible vacation policy

Job summary

EY invites seasoned security professionals to join Challenger Core, a program within EY focused on building safer AI-enabled services. You will define secure patterns, model threats, and guide engineers to implement practical controls across data, tools, and workflows.

You will work with product and engineering teams to design defensive architectures, perform red-team testing, and translate findings into reusable security patterns that scale with fast-moving AI initiatives.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Production security: securing modern applications, cloud environments, identities, data, networks and pipelines.
• AI systems knowledge: working understanding of generative and agentic AI, including retrieval, model access, tool use, evaluation, and runtime behavior.
• Hands-on automation: building or extending security tests, controls, telemetry, or adversarial assessments.

Responsibilities

• Set the security direction. Own reusable AI security patterns, control objectives, reference architectures, and threat models aligned to the risk and autonomy of each use case.
• Join builders early. Work with teams before key design choices are fixed, identifying credible attack paths and shaping controls that fit the product and delivery model.
• Design scoped authority. Create practical patterns for identity, access, isolation, approvals, and recovery so tool-using AI acts within clear and enforceable boundaries.
• Protect sensitive information. Embed security across the data lifecycle, preserving confidentiality, integrity, provenance, permitted use, and monitored access.
• Secure the delivery path. Integrate automated security tests, policy gates, trusted artifacts, traceable changes, and safe rollback into engineering workflows.
• Test adversarially. Run focused red-team exercises against AI-specific abuse cases and convert findings into repeatable tests, stronger platform patterns, and actionable guidance.
• Build runtime protection. Use end-to-end evidence and behavioral signals to detect abnormal actions, privilege misuse, attempted exfiltration, and degrading controls.
• Strengthen response. Support vulnerability triage and incidents with clear evidence, containment options, recovery actions, and lessons that improve future designs.
• Advise on residual risk. Give product, security, evaluation, and risk leaders concise technical recommendations while keeping approval and risk-acceptance decisions with accountable owners.
• Build shared capability. Create reference implementations, coach engineers, and turn production lessons into reusable controls that make the safer path easier to adopt.

Skills

Security engineering depth

AI threat judgment

Control engineering

Adversarial mindset

Automation capability

Pragmatic influence

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field

Job description

EY invites seasoned security professionals to join Challenger Core, a program within EY focused on building safer AI-enabled services. You will define secure patterns, model threats, and guide engineers to implement practical controls across data, tools, and workflows.

You will work with product and engineering teams to design defensive architectures, perform red-team testing, and translate findings into reusable security patterns that scale with fast-moving AI initiatives.