Principal Engineer, Cyber Defense
About Nscale
Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.
We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you’ll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you’ll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.
About the Role
We’re hiring a Principal Engineer, Cyber Defense to build Nscale’s cyber defense capability from the ground up and define how security signals, detections, and automation operate at scale.
This role sits at the intersection of security engineering, data engineering, and detection science , with broad scope across cyber defense engineering, detection architecture, and security telemetry. You’ll work closely with Cloud, Infrastructure, and Platform Engineering teams to ensure security is embedded, while also partnering with threat intelligence and helping shape the future-state SOC model.
This is a high-impact builder role for someone who wants to do things right the first time. You’ll help move the function from manual analysis and ad hoc scripts to a more automated, AI-assisted, and data-driven operating model — directly influencing how Nscale detects, investigates, and responds to threats now and as the company scales.
What you'll be doing
Security Data & Signals Engineering
Design and build the security data substrate, including dataset discovery, source health monitoring, log pipeline hardening, metadata enrichment, and lifecycle management
Move the function from manual analysis and ad hoc scripts to fully automated, continuously improving security data pipelines
Define what good telemetry looks like and build the infrastructure to enforce log quality, not just volume
Build data models and aggregation layers that support detection, investigation, threat hunting, and downstream analytics
Detection Engineering
Engineer and mature detections from initial signal to high-confidence, low-noise clean kill alerts
Build detection-as-code practices, including versioning, testing, CI/CD pipelines, and continuous tuning using statistical feedback
Define coverage frameworks and drive systematic improvement across the detection estate
Partner with threat intelligence to ensure detections reflect current adversary behavior and emerging attack patterns
Automation & AI-Assisted Defense
Design automation across triage, enrichment, investigation, and response workflows to reduce analyst toil without sacrificing fidelity
Apply AI and agentic approaches to security operations with practical thinking on precision, recall, model risk, and adversarial bypass
Evaluate and integrate MDR capabilities, security tooling, and vendor solutions with a builder’s view of what to buy versus build
Technical Leadership
Set the technical direction for cyber defense engineering, detection architecture, and security telemetry across Nscale
Work closely with Cloud, Infrastructure, and Platform Engineering teams to embed security into the platform
Define the future-state SOC model for a detection and response function that is largely automated, AI-assisted, and data-driven
Mentor engineers and help grow technical depth across the security function
KPIs
High-confidence, low-noise detection quality
Security data pipeline automation and reliability
Detection coverage improvement across the estate
Reduction in analyst toil through automation
About You
12+ years in security engineering, detection engineering, threat hunting, or security operations, with depth in at least two of these areas
Hands-on experience building security data pipelines across ingestion, parsing, enrichment, normalization, and quality control at scale
Strong detection engineering background, including writing, testing, tuning, and maturing detections in production environments
Cloud-scale security experience, ideally across multiple major cloud providers or large SaaS environments
Engineering fluency with object storage, serverless compute, databases, infrastructure-as-code, and automation tooling
Practical experience applying ML or AI to security problems, with a realistic view of what works, what doesn’t, and where the risks are
Experience influencing security architecture and tooling decisions at a senior or principal level
Familiarity with building-stage environments and a systems mindset for understanding how data flows, where signals degrade, how detections drift, and how automation fails
Experience building or scaling threat intelligence functions, MDR transition strategy, or managed detection models is a plus
Background in forensics, incident response, red team, adversary simulation, or personal security tooling and open-source contributions is a plus
What we can offer you
At Nscale, you'll find a collaborative, supportive, and innovative environment where your contributions spark real impact. We're building something extraordinary, and we want you at the core.
Highly competitive compensation package (base + bonus + equity), with performance reviews every 12 months. 🚀
Join one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies — your chance to directly shape how global AI capacity is planned and deployed. ✨
Expect a dynamic progression plan tailored to your ambitions. Grow by leading critical cross-functional initiatives and shaping capital strategy — always with our full support.
Human-First Flexibility: We treat you as humans first. 🫶🏽 Our flexible workplace trusts Nscalers to deliver, giving you the autonomy to shape your day around life's moments.
Equal Opportunities Statement
We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.
The responsibilities outlined in this job description are not exhaustive and are intended to provide a general overview of the position. The employee may be required to perform additional duties, tasks, and responsibilities as assigned by management, consistent with the skills and qualifications required for the role.
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