Senior Cyber Defense Engineer

We’re looking for a Senior Cyber Defense Engineer to help secure the systems, identities, devices, and collaboration platforms that power how Gong employees work every day.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role within Corporate Security Engineering, part of Gong’s Cyber Defense organization. You’ll help design, implement, and scale security controls across endpoint, identity, SaaS, email, collaboration, zero-trust access, and data protection for a global, distributed workforce.

This role is a strong fit for someone who combines deep technical judgment with a builder mindset, strong cross-functional partnership, and a pragmatic approach to reducing risk without slowing the business down.

• Key parts of Gong’s corporate security engineering roadmap across endpoint, identity, SaaS, email, collaboration, access, and data protection.
• Endpoint security engineering across a global macOS, Windows, and Linux fleet, including EDR coverage, health, hardening baselines, and containment readiness in close partnership with IT and DRE.
• Identity and access security initiatives, including SSO, phishing-resistant MFA, passwordless adoption, conditional access, device trust, PAM, joiner-mover-leaver controls, and service-account hygiene.
• Email and collaboration security controls across email, Slack, Drive, and related business platforms.
• SaaS security posture management, shadow SaaS discovery, and third-party or OAuth governance.
• Zero-trust and corporate network security initiatives for a globally distributed workforce.
• Data protection and insider-risk capabilities across endpoint, email, browser, and SaaS channels.
• Corporate vulnerability and baseline management programs in partnership with IT.
• Security guardrails for employee use of AI tools, with an enablement-first mindset.
• Automation, integrations, and reusable engineering patterns that make the security program more scalable and effective.

• Building strong preventive controls without creating unnecessary friction for employees.
• Designing scalable protections for endpoints, identity, SaaS, and collaboration systems used across a global workforce.
• Governing OAuth access, shadow IT, and employee AI-tool adoption in ways that enable the business safely.
• Improving data protection across the paths most relevant to Gong’s most sensitive assets, including customer conversation data, revenue data, source code, and AI or ML assets.
• Reducing manual work by engineering durable automation, workflows, and operational guardrails.
• Partnering closely with IT, DRE, People, Legal, GRC, Procurement, and engineering teams to implement controls that stick.
• Raising the consistency, reliability, and maintainability of the corporate security environment over time.

• Strengthening Gong’s security posture across endpoints, identity, SaaS, email, collaboration, and access.
• Helping Gong move faster with AI tooling, distributed work, and SaaS adoption because the right guardrails exist.
• Creating engineering leverage through reusable frameworks, integrations, and standards that make the whole function stronger.
• Helping define what great corporate security engineering looks like inside an AI-native company.

• A senior technical security builder who enjoys planning, designing, and implementing security programs at scale.
• Experienced in corporate security engineering, enterprise security engineering, or similarly hands-on defensive roles in modern SaaS or cloud environments.
• Strong in several of the following areas: endpoint security, identity security, PAM, email security, collaboration security, SSPM, ZTNA, DLP, insider risk, and corporate vulnerability management.
• Proven in designing and implementing programs, not just administering tools.
• An engineer at heart, with experience building automation, APIs, workflows, integrations, and scalable operational practices.
• Comfortable partnering closely with IT and other business stakeholders to ship secure solutions that employees will actually adopt.
• Pragmatic, collaborative, and able to balance strong controls with usability, speed, and enablement.
• A mentor who raises technical standards, establishes durable engineering norms, and helps others grow.
• Excited to help shape how a modern corporate security program should work in an AI-native company.

Required Qualification:

• 5+ years of experience in any of the following areas:
• Security Data Pipeline Engineering
• Detection Engineering
• SIEM Engineering
• Cyber Intelligence and Threat Hunting
• Security Platform Engineering
• Proficiency with EDR/XDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, MS Defender), Cloud Security Posture Management (Wiz, Prisma Cloud, Orca), and WAFs (Cloudflare, Akamai).
• Proficiency in deploying and maintaining Zero Trust security platforms and controls
• Experience building data ingestion pipelines using CI/CD methodologies.
• Proven experience building, testing, and tuning custom detection logic and familiarity with Query Languages (KQL, SQL, SPL) for automation needs.
• Familiarity with attack frameworks (MITRE ATT&CK)  and mitigation strategies.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and teamwork abilities.

• Experience securing AI tool usage in the enterprise, including data-flow restrictions, sanctioned-tool models, OAuth governance, and telemetry hooks for downstream detection.
• Experience in a high-growth, global SaaS company with a distributed workforce.
• Strong knowledge of identity-first security architectures and zero-trust access models.
• Experience building KPI-driven programs around coverage, adoption, SLA performance, and control effectiveness.
• Familiarity with adjacent detection and response workflows so preventive controls and response actions reinforce each other.

• This role is part of Cyber Defense and is focused on the corporate environment.
• Corporate Security Engineering owns endpoint security, identity security, email and collaboration security, SaaS posture, zero trust access, DLP and insider-risk tooling, corporate vulnerability management, and employee AI-tool security.
• This role is not the primary owner for CI/CD security, supply-chain controls, infrastructure-as-code guardrails, product application security, product pentesting, or cloud infrastructure provisioning and reliability.

What makes the Security department at Gong unique? 

Here at Gong, we trust and empower our employees with ownership to solve complex problems, make the right decisions, and build the best products that create radical impact. We call it “Own. Solve. Impact.” 

Our security team is at the forefront of a monumental shift in implementing processes. Instead of simply saying "no," we embrace the mindset of "let's explore how we can make it work." Our security team brings a wealth of backgrounds, experience, and wisdom to the table. Which means that age comes before security, or is it the other way around?

If you are curious to discover Gong's wonderful and challenging world, what are you waiting for? Don’t delay - fill in your application details. Who knows, maybe there’s a Gongster in you!

We encourage our employees to express their personality and identity (whether gender, ethnic, religious, or sexual), and we ensure fairness and equal opportunities. We follow a hybrid working model that combines working from home, on the go, or at the office. This allows us: flexibility, autonomy, positive work relationships, and effective work habits. If these considerations are important to you when choosing a workplace, we'd love to see you with us. To review Gong's privac