Cyber Security Engineer, Principal

Company:
Qualcomm Incorporated

Job Area:
Information Technology Group, Information Technology Group > Cyber Security Engineering

General Summary:

The Qualcomm AI Cybersecurity Team is dedicated to protecting the company's use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), defending against AI-driven attacks, and augmenting security capabilities with AI-powered innovation. We strive to foster a culture of responsible AI innovation, ensuring the integrity and accountability of AI models and their applications.

The Information Security & Risk Management (ISRM) organization is looking for a strong team player with extensive experience in AI Security. As the Principal AI Security Engineer, you will be responsible for leading the design, implementation, and governance of security measures across the organization's AI ecosystem. This role sits at the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, ensuring that AI models, platforms, and applications are secure, resilient, and compliant with evolving regulatory and ethical standards.

This role requires full-time onsite work in San Diego, CA (5 days per week).

Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 7+ years of cybersecurity-relevant work experience.
OR
High school diploma or equivalent and 8+ years of cybersecurity-relevant work experience.

Physical Requirements:
Frequently transports and installs equipment up to 40 lbs.

We are a collaborative team
We are always learning, sharing, and researching. You will work with engineers and business stakeholders across the company to secure complex infrastructure and applications. You will need communication, analytical, and interpersonal skills, and the ability to learn and grow in a rapidly evolving environment. We welcome candidates who are passionate about cybersecurity and eager to learn and grow as engineers on our team. At Qualcomm, we are committed to fostering a culture of innovation. We value collaboration, creativity, and the power of diverging viewpoints. A significant part of our success as a company comes from our ability to collaborate effectively, analyze complex problems, identify potential solutions, and ultimately converge on a winning strategy. This collective buy-in fosters incredible teamwork and drives our achievements. Join us and be part of a team dedicated to pushing the boundaries of technology and making a positive impact on the world.

We are looking for motivated people
We are looking for those who have experience in the areas listed, but even more importantly a strong desire to learn and grow as an AI Cybersecurity engineer and team player. At this level, we are committed to help provide training opportunities to acclimate new employees to how Qualcomm's cybersecurity team operates.

Key Responsibilities

• AI Threat Intelligence: Stay ahead of emerging threats targeting AI systems, including model inversion, data poisoning, prompt injection, and agentic AI misuse
• AI Firewall & Gateway Oversight: Contribute to the design and implementation of AI Gateway controls to monitor and protect internal and external AI usage
• Metrics & Compliance: Define and track AI security KPIs (e.g., model robustness, architecture review completion, policy adherence) and support compliance to standards
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with data scientists, platform engineers, legal, and compliance teams to embed security into AI innovation workflows
• Mentorship & Leadership: Serve as a technical mentor and thought leader across ISRM and engineering teams, helping to shape the AI security strategy
• Design, develop and implement AI-powered security solutions.
• Troubleshoot and resolve AI security issues, collaborating with cross-functional teams as needed.
• Implement adversarial training techniques during AI application and agent development.
• Evaluate AI model, application, and agent robustness against common attacks.
• Conduct regular adversarial penetration tests on AI-powered solutions through AI/automation to build a scalable, repeatable process

Preferred Qualifications

Qualcomm values people from all walks of life and backgrounds. We understand not everyone will meet all the qualifications below on day one. That's okay! If you're passionate about technology and want to grow your skills, if you cover even some of these preferences - we encourage you to apply.

• 10+ years of experience in cybersecurity, with 3+ years in AI/ML security.
• Deep understanding of AI/ML technologies (e.g., LLMs, transformers, agentic AI) and associated security risks.
• Experience with secure ML pipelines, adversarial machine learning, and AI model evaluation.
• Familiarity with AI governance frameworks, regulatory trends (e.g., EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF), and ethical AI principles.
• Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence across technical and executive audiences.
• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, AI/ML, or related field preferred.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:
Applies expert knowledge in one or more security-related areas (e.g., cryptography, hacker exploits, reverse engineering, etc.) to act as a technical lead on large projects/programs and ensures they are driven to completion.
Leads a team to ensure that complex security risks and vulnerabilities are identified, understood, and prioritized; works with other teams to resolve issues and execute mitigation strategy.
Stays up-to-date on latest trends to prevent potential attacks and gains buy-in from other areas to promote the adoption of new technologies and methods.
Leverages expertise when conducting root cause analyses to find the cause of highly complex security issues in products that may involve multiple groups or processes. Presents findings to critical senior leaders and cross-functional stakeholders.
Proactively identifies security risks to existing systems and infrastructure, and discusses risks with senior leadership outside of project team to construct solutions.
Reviews technical documentation for large projects before publication and provides feedback as needed. Presents complicated technical information to senior leadership (e.g., Sr. Director and above).
Considers all aspects as lead of a design by determining which teams should get involved and which tests need to be conducted, reviewing risk areas and impact, and highlighting the right set of issues to share with senior leadership and the entire team.
Collaborates with other Engineers to prioritize and address escalations that impact a large number of customers/stakeholders in order to create and carry out solutions that meet security requirements, updates senior leadership about critical security issues, and addresses and communicates about highly complex, security-related issues.
Meets with high-priority and/or high-profile project teams and business stakeholders to identify security requirements as an industry expert, and makes recommendations based on the configurations, systems, and devices impacted by proposed enhancements or upgrades.
Engages with business partners cross-functionally (e.g., testing group, product group, customers) to develop and execute a plan and system design for a large initiative.
Leads high-risk security architecture reviews with cross-functional project members and business stakeholders to discuss security risks and identify additional changes to security architecture diagrams.

Level of Responsibility:
Working independently with no supervision.
Taking responsibility for own work and making decisions with more significant in their impact, influencing overall program or project success, finances, and/or the ability to meet objectives; errors are not readily apparent due to the complexity of work process/product or time between decisions and results; errors typically result in significant expenditure of time, resources, and funds to correct.
Using verbal and written communication skills to convey complex and/or detailed information to multiple individuals/audiences with differing knowledge levels. Role may require strong negotiation and influence, communication to large groups or high-level constituents.
Having a great degree of influence over key organizational decisions (e.g., is making or directly making key decisions that have substantial impact on the organization).
Using deductive and inductive problem solving is required; multiple approaches may be taken/necessary to solve the problem; often information is missing or conflicting; advanced data analysis and interpretation skills are required.
Exercising exceptional creativity is needed to innovate new ideas and develop innovative products/ processes without established objectives or known parameters.
Occasionally participates in strategic planning within own area affecting immediate operations.

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).

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EEO Employer: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or any other protected classification.

Qualcomm expects its employees to abide by all applicable policies and procedures, including but not limited to security and other requirements regarding protection of Company confidential information and other confidential and/or proprietary information, to the extent those requirements are permissible under applicable law.

Pay range and Other Compensation & Benefits:
$184,500.00 - $276,700.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer - and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.