Staff Security Engineer

Job Description Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences, because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection. We’re seeking a Staff Security Engineer (P8) to join our Threat Prevention Engineering (TPE) team, part of Zendesk’s Cyber Defense Fusion Center (CDFC). In this role you’ll own and drive large-scale security engineering initiatives that blend modern detection, automation, and AI-assisted workflows to reduce risk and improve our ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats across Zendesk’s cloud and platform environments. Problems you’ll solve AI Capability Gap: AI is already woven into how our team works. This role brings the focused technical leadership needed to push that further, owning the roadmap, driving intentional adoption, and turning emerging AI patterns into mature, production-grade security capabilities. Engineering Capacity & Delivery Velocity: There's more high-priority work than the team can currently absorb. You'll close that gap directly through delivery and indirectly by multiplying what the people around you can accomplish. Organizational Integration & Control Coverage: A newly absorbed team has created real gaps in control coverage and tooling alignment. You'll own the engineering work that closes them in a structured, risk-prioritized way. Legacy Technical Debt: Several critical systems are overdue for modernization. You'll lead phased migrations to cloud-native architectures without disrupting what's already running. Scale of systems you’ll own Enterprise-scale security data pipelines ingesting and processing telemetry across a large, multi-cloud environment Kubernetes-native, AWS-hosted containerized security services spanning EKS, Lambda, and supporting infrastructure A cross-platform tooling ecosystem covering detection, response, cloud security, and threat intelligence that the entire security organization depends on A centralized agentic automation platform that security engineers and analysts rely on daily to move faster and work smarter A team-wide AI strategy and roadmap that shapes how every engineer on the team applies AI to security problems An organizational control framework enforcing technical standards and integrations across multiple business units What you’ll be doing You'll own the team's AI strategic roadmap , from evaluating emerging frameworks and running proof-of-concepts through shipping agentic and AI-powered capabilities into production You'll architect and operate the cloud-native security data infrastructure the team depends on, including detection pipelines, log management, telemetry collection, and data rehydration at enterprise scale Complex, multi-phase security engineering initiatives will be yours to lead. That means design, stakeholder alignment, phased migrations, and seeing things through to production without disrupting what's already running You'll build automation-first security workflows , including AI-assisted triage and agentic automations that reduce manual effort and make the team faster You'll work closely with engineering, platform, cloud, and newly integrated teams to align controls, tooling, and workflows across the organization You'll set technical direction and raise the bar for the team, mentoring peers in modern security engineering practices and AI tooling adoption You'll define and track the metrics that actually reflect security outcomes, and use that data to drive continuous improvement What you bring to the role You have 8 years in security or software engineering and have genuinely operated at Staff or Senior scope, owning hard multi-phase projects from whiteboard to production with real outcomes to show for it You write production-grade Go and/or Python and have built security tooling that people a ... (truncated, view full listing at source)