Senior Cybersecurity Engineer - Cloud Security

At phia we hire talented and passionate people who are focused on collaborative, meaningful work, providing technical and operational subject matter expertise and support services to our partners and clients.

phia is hiring a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer (Cloud Security) to support cyber defense engineering and operations at a large Federal agency. This role will provide technical expertise for hybrid, multi-cloud environments, focusing on security configuration hardening, integration, and automation, to protect assets, data, and identity. These efforts will enable proactive threat & fraud detection and mitigation, and continuous policy compliance assessment.

This position offers REMOTE work flexibility, while primary customer locations include the Fairfax, VA and Raleigh, NC areas. Qualified candidates must be U.S. Citizens and located in the United States. The position requires Public Trust security vetting approval.

What You'll Do

• Security Posture & Compliance Automation: Design and implement automated compliance assessments to enforce hardening standards (CIS, NIST) across cloud accounts and on-premises virtualized environments.
• Asset & Data Security: Architect and maintain the security of our sprawling asset inventory. Implement data-at-rest and data-in-transit encryption strategies that span from physical data center servers to cloud-native storage.
• Identity & Fraud Mitigation: Develop and secure the "Identity Fabric" linking 600k+ employees and millions of commercial customers. Collaborate with Fraud teams to integrate signals from SIEM and Databricks to detect and block malicious account activity.
• Hybrid Engineering: Build and manage secure connectivity (Transit Gateways, Service Mesh) between on-premises hypervisors and multi-cloud environments, ensuring consistent policy enforcement.
• Threat Detection & Response: Partner with the SOC to develop high-fidelity detection logic. Build SOAR playbooks that automate the isolation of compromised cloud workloads or on-premises VMs.
• Efficacy Assessment: Support ongoing "Purple Team" exercises and control testing to validate that security tools (EDR, WAF, DLP) are performing as intended across all tenants.
• AI/ML Security Governance (Adversarial Defense): Establish security guardrails for the enterprise's internal and customer-facing AI models. This includes protecting Databricks training pipelines from data poisoning and implementing mitigations for LLM-specific threats like prompt injection and sensitive data leakage.
• Hyper-Automation of Security Operations: Drive the transition from manual "click-to-operate" security to Autonomous Security Operations. This involves building advanced SOAR playbooks that use ML-based triggers to perform auto-remediation across hybrid environments without human intervention.
• Business Process Streamlining: Partner with business units to integrate security "invisibly" into their workflows. Use automation to reduce "security friction" in logistics and retail operations, ensuring that compliance checks (like PCI or SOC2) are performed continuously and programmatically.
• AI Asset Management: Discover and catalog "Shadow AI" usage across the enterprise, ensuring all third-party AI tools meet the enterprise's privacy and security standards.Communicate findings and insights clearly to technical and business stakeholders.

Who You Are

• Cloud Fluency: Expert-level knowledge of security architectures in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Mastery of Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation to deploy and manage security configurations at massive scale.
• Big Data Analytics for Security: Ability to leverage Databricks to perform deep-dive analysis on billions of logs for threat hunting and efficacy reporting.
• Container & Orchestration Security: Experience securing Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) and Docker environments, focusing on runtime protection and image integrity.
• Identity Mastery: Proficiency with OAuth 2.0, SAML, and CIAM solutions for large-scale customer and employee authentication.
• Security Data Science: Proficiency in using Python PySpark/Pandas) within Databricks to build custom anomaly detection models that go beyond standard SIEM correlation rules.
• Generative AI Security: Knowledge of the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and experience implementing AI gateways or "firewalls" to monitor and filter AI-generated traffic.
• API-First Automation: Deep expertise in building "glue code" that connects disparate COTS and custom applications via secure, automated APIs to streamline cross-functional business activities.
• Algorithmic Literacy: The ability to explain to non-technical stakeholders how AI-driven security decisions (like blocking a suspicious $1M commercial transaction) are made and how to handle "false positives" at scale.
• Efficiency Mindset: A relentless focus on identifying repetitive manual tasks (e.g., firewall rule reviews, access audits) and replacing them with self-healing, automated systems.

Required Education + Experience:

• Bachelor's and/or Master's degree preferred, but can be substituted with significant experience
• 8+ years of relevant experience (cybersecurity architecture & engineering)
• 4+ years focused on large-scale cloud or hybrid environments

Preferred Skills:

• Demonstrated AI or Machine Learning expertise applied to solve security or operational scaling problems.
• Demonstrated experience managing environments with 10,000+ workloads and high-availability requirements for retail/commercial applications.
• Experience with Databricks and Splunk (cloud data integration, analytics, etc.).

Preferred Certifications:

• General Cybersecurity certifications:
  • Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
• Cloud Security certifications:
  • Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)
  • GIAC Public Cloud Security (GPCS)
  • GIAC Cloud Security Automation (GCSA)
• Cloud platform-specific certifications:
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified Security - Specialty
  • Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate

Security Clearance/Vetting:

• U.S. Citizenship required
• Ability to complete Public Trust vetting

Who We Are

phia LLC ("phia") is a Northern Virginia based, small business established in 2011 with focus in Cyber Intelligence, Cyber Security/Defense, Intrusion Analysis & Incident Response, Cyber Architecture & Capability Analysis, Cyber Policy & Strategy, Information Assurance/Security, Compliance, Certification & Accreditation, Communications Security, Traditional Security, and Facilities Security. phia also provides cyber operations support functions such as: Program and Process Management, Engineering, Development, and Systems Administration that allows for Cyber Operations to efficiently integrate our customer's missions and objectives. phia supports various agencies and offices within the Department of Defense (DoD), Federal government, and private/commercial entities.

phia offers excellent benefits to enhance work-life balance, including the following: