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 US 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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