Principal Active Defense Engineer

Your work days are brighter here. We’re obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we’re shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you’ll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We’re in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you’ll do meaningful work with Workmates who’ve got your back. In return, we’ll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you’ve found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too. About the Team Our Active Defense team is a group of highly skilled and dedicated professionals who are passionate about protecting our organization from cyber threats. We source, evaluate, and analyze both internal and external data, providing critical insight to a variety of security and business teams. We use emerging and relevant intelligence to test our defenses rapidly. We perform detailed analysis while meeting the challenge to scale to the business needs. We are a core function of the overall Cyber Defense organization at Workday that helps keep the company and its customer data safe every day. Our team members have a strong background in cybersecurity, data analysis, AI and machine learning, and detection engineering. We use innovative tools and technologies to analyze and visualize data, including Splunk, Spark, Python, and AI-assisted analysis and automation tools. We value teamwork and collaborate closely with other security teams to ensure that our organization stays ahead of emerging cyber threats. We are committed to continuous learning and professional development, and regularly attend industry conferences and training sessions to stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices in security analytics. About the Role This role is the senior technical anchor for Active Defense. As a Principal Active Defense Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how Workday detects threats, and you will be the engineer the team looks to when a problem is ambiguous, spans several systems, or has no obvious owner. The breadth here is real. Our work runs from translating threat intelligence into new detections, through the quality and fidelity of the alerts we hand to incident response, to the detections-as-code pipeline, curated datasets, and CI/CD tooling that all of it depends on. We also serve as the subject matter experts other teams come to for audits, coverage questions, and platform decisions. You will be expected to operate across that whole surface rather than in one corner of it. The engineers who do best in this seat tend to come from a strong software, platform, or data engineering foundation applied to security, rather than from a purely analytical security path. You will lead large initiatives from concept to production with little direction, and you will decide how we apply AI-assisted analysis, automation, and agents to detection work. This is a team early in its growth, so the standards you set will be adopted broadly and quickly, and raising the technical ceiling of the engineers around you through mentorship, design review, and the standard your own work sets is a core part of the job. This is a hands-on engineering role rather than a people management role. Responsibilities: - Set the technical direction. Own the architecture decisions, detection met