Staff Cyber Defense Engineer

Gong empowers revenue teams with AI. More than 5,000 companies use Gong to better understand customer interactions, automate critical workflows, and drive stronger business outcomes.

We’re looking for a Staff Cyber Defense Engineer to help shape the strategy, architecture, and cross-team execution model of Gong’s Cyber Defense organization.

As a staff-level individual contributor, you will work across Corporate Security Engineering, Detection and Response Engineering, and Offensive Security to ensure Gong’s defensive capabilities operate as one coherent system.

This role is a strong fit for someone who combines deep technical judgment with systems thinking, cross-functional influence, and the ability to turn complex security challenges into clear architectural direction, aligned programs, and measurable risk reduction.

• The end-to-end defensive architecture across Gong’s Cyber Defense organization.
• Cross-team architecture decisions that span identity, endpoint, SaaS, telemetry, response readiness, validation, and risk reduction.
• Identification of control gaps, overlaps, weak handoffs, and systemic friction across teams.
• Multi-team security initiatives that require sustained coordination, sequencing, and executive visibility.
• Group-level prioritization support, including helping leadership evaluate what should be done first, next, or not at all.
• Executive-ready security narratives that translate technical work into business risk, progress, tradeoffs, and outcomes.
• Group-wide KPI and measurement frameworks that reflect real security impact rather than raw activity.
• Improvements to the operating model, including ownership boundaries, team interfaces, escalation paths, and dependency management.
• Special strategic initiatives for the Head of Cyber Defense that require high trust, technical depth, and organizational leverage.

• Connecting team-specific work into a coherent defensive system rather than a collection of isolated programs.
• Identifying where architecture, ownership, or sequencing problems slow down execution across Cyber Defense.
• Ensuring preventive controls, detections, response actions, and validation efforts reinforce one another.
• Turning offensive findings and operational lessons into durable architectural improvements across the group.
• Helping the organization make better decisions about tradeoffs, dependencies, and long-term security direction.
• Translating complex technical initiatives into clear recommendations for leaders and stakeholders.
• Reducing friction in major cross-team programs by aligning goals, owners, milestones, and decision points.
• Improving how Cyber Defense scales as the group grows, without creating shadow ownership or organizational ambiguity.

• Making Gong’s Cyber Defense organization more integrated, effective, and strategically aligned.
• Increasing execution speed across complex initiatives that involve multiple security teams and business partners.
• Helping leadership make clearer decisions with better visibility into risk, progress, and priorities.
• Creating architectural consistency across preventive, detective, and validation capabilities.
• Strengthening Gong’s ability to reduce risk in measurable ways while enabling the business to move quickly.
• Helping define what a modern, AI-native Cyber Defense organization should look like at scale.

• A senior security architect or staff-level technical leader with strong systems thinking and broad defensive security depth.
• Experienced in one or more of the following areas: corporate security engineering, detection and response, security architecture, offensive security, enterprise security, or cross-functional cyber defense leadership.
• Experienced in leading complex technical initiatives across organizational boundaries, not just within a single team or domain.
• Able to identify patterns, dependencies, and architectural weaknesses across large security programs.
• Strong at translating technical complexity into clear priorities, frameworks, and executive-facing recommendations.
• Comfortable influencing without formal authority and building trust across managers, engineers, and stakeholders.
• Pragmatic, structured, and effective in ambiguous environments where ownership and sequencing need to be clarified.
• A strong writer and communicator who can shape both technical direction and leadership understanding.
• Motivated by building leverage for an entire security organization, not just owning a narrow technical domain.

• Experience working across multiple security disciplines such as corporate security, incident response, offensive security, security engineering, or detection engineering.
• Experience building or refining defensive architecture in a high-growth, global SaaS company.
• Experience creating KPI frameworks, operating models, or cross-team planning mechanisms for security organizations.
• Familiarity with identity-first security, zero-trust models, SaaS risk, endpoint security, telemetry pipelines, and validation-led improvement loops.
• Experience helping security organizations adapt to modern AI, SaaS, and distributed-workforce risks.

This role:

• Is part of Cyber Defense and operates at the group level rather than inside a single team.
• Is intended to strengthen alignment and execution across Corporate Security Engineering, Detection and Response Engineering, and Offensive Security.
• Does not replace team leaders, directly own day-to-day incident response, or serve as the default execution owner for each team’s backlog.
• Focuses on cross-team architecture, strategic integration, program leadership, and organizational leverage.

At Gong, security is expected to enable the business, not just protect it. We look for people who can solve hard problems, partner effectively across the company, and build durable solutions that help the organization move faster and safer.

You’ll join a team that values ownership, strong technical craft, practical problem solving, and visible impact. If you want to help shape how a modern Cyber Defense organization operates in an AI-native company, this is a chance to do meaningful work with broad influence.