Distinguished Engineer, AI Threat Defense

About the Role
 

Thomson Reuters is enhancing its Cyber Defense capability in response to an AI-driven threat landscape that has fundamentally changed the speed, scale, and nature of cyberattacks.
 

The Distinguished Engineer, AI Threat Defense is a senior individual contributor and technical authority within the Cyber Defense organization. Reporting to the VP of Cyber Defense, this role will shape how Thomson Reuters anticipates, detects, investigates, and responds to threats affecting AI-enabled products, services, and enterprise operations.
 

This is a highly influential, hands-on technical role with no direct reports. You will lead through engineering depth, sound judgment, architecture, collaboration, and mentorship—working across SOC Operations, CIRT, Threat Detection Engineering, Vulnerability Management, Attack Surface Reduction, Cyber Threat Management, Product Engineering, Security Engineering & Architecture, and AppSec.
 

Rather than creating a separate AI security function, you will evolve core Cyber Defense capabilities to address AI-specific threats and responsibly apply AI across established detection, investigation, and response processes.
 

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction for AI threat defense across Thomson Reuters, ensuring AI-specific risks are addressed through the organization's core cyber defense strategy, architecture, engineering practices, and operating model.

• Define how the organization monitors, detects, investigates, and responds to attacks involving AI-enabled products, LLM applications, agentic workflows, models, AI infrastructure, and associated integrations.

• Develop defensive approaches for AI-specific threats, including prompt injection, jailbreaks and guardrail bypass, sensitive-information and system-prompt disclosure, unsafe downstream execution, excessive agent autonomy, unauthorized tool use, MCP exploitation, model and data poisoning, AI supply-chain compromise, model denial-of-service and denial-of-wallet attacks, model, prompt, and intellectual-property theft, and deepfake-enabled social engineering.

• Partner with Product Engineering, Security Engineering & Architecture, and AppSec to establish secure, observable, and defensible patterns for AI-enabled applications, services, infrastructure, agents, and tool-use workflows.

• Ensure AI security requirements, meaningful telemetry, and response readiness are designed into the software development lifecycle and production operating environment.

• Strengthen existing security telemetry, detection engineering, monitoring, incident investigation, and response practices to identify and contain AI-related threats effectively.

• Architect the responsible use of AI within the existing 24/7 SOC and CIRT operating model to improve triage, investigation, decision-making, response execution, and analyst effectiveness.

• Develop detection content, security analytics, investigation methods, playbooks, and response workflows that enable SOC and CIRT teams to investigate and respond to AI-related security events.

• Maintain appropriate human oversight, evidence quality, auditability, safeguards, and rollback mechanisms as AI capabilities are adopted within Cyber Defense operations.

• Track emerging offensive AI capabilities, adversary tooling, threat-actor adoption, AI vulnerability research, and changes in the broader threat landscape, translating findings into practical defensive improvements.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across Cyber Defense, raising organizational capability in AI security, detection engineering, threat analysis, and incident response.

• Influence technical decisions through architecture reviews, technical standards, direct engineering collaboration, design guidance, and clear communication with technical and executive stakeholders.

• Represent Thomson Reuters in relevant customer discussions, industry groups, regulatory engagements, and AI security communities.
   

About You
 

You are a deeply technical cybersecurity leader who can operate at a Distinguished Engineer level without relying on formal organizational authority. You enjoy solving ambiguous, high-impact problems, establishing technical direction, and turning complex security challenges into scalable, durable capabilities.
 

You combine strong cyber defense expertise with a practical understanding of AI-enabled systems and how they are deployed, monitored, secured, and attacked. You can work comfortably across strategy and execution: shaping architecture, improving detection and response, partnering with product and engineering teams, and staying close to real-world operational outcomes.
 

You build trust through technical credibility, collaboration, sound judgment, and a commitment to helping others succeed. You can communicate complex AI security risks and trade-offs clearly to engineers, analysts, architects, executives, customers, and regulators.
 

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in cybersecurity, security engineering, security architecture, threat detection, incident response, or a related technical field.

• Experience operating as a Principal, Staff, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent senior technical leader within a large, complex organization.

• Strong hands-on experience in Cyber Defense, including detection engineering, security operations, threat hunting, security analytics, incident response, security architecture, or closely related disciplines.

• A proven ability to establish technical strategy and deliver security capabilities that are adopted across multiple teams, systems, and operating functions.

• Practical experience securing or governing AI-enabled systems, including LLM applications, AI infrastructure, models, agentic workflows, AI integrations, MCP, or comparable tool-use patterns.

• Strong understanding of AI security risks, including prompt injection, data exposure, unsafe model output and downstream execution, agent and tool abuse, model and data poisoning, AI supply-chain risk, and AI-enabled social engineering.

• Proven experience architecting or delivering AI-assisted detection and response capabilities within a mature 24/7 SOC, CIRT, or comparable cyber defense environment.

• Experience strengthening an established security organization and driving adoption of security capabilities across SOC Operations, CIRT, Threat Detection Engineering, Vulnerability Management, and Attack Surface Reduction.

• Ability to translate AI security risks into clear architectural patterns, engineering requirements, detection logic, and actionable incident-response practices.

• Experience partnering with Product Engineering, Security Engineering & Architecture, and AppSec teams to embed security into development and production processes.

• Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to work effectively across executive leadership, engineers, architects, analysts, incident responders, customers, regulators, and other stakeholders.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor technical professionals and raise the technical capability of a broader security organization.

• Experience operating within a regulated, multi-segment enterprise and partnering across legal, compliance, procurement, governance, engineering, and security organizations.

• Experience in financial services, legal technology, professional information services, or another highly regulated industry is preferred.

• Experience embedding significant technical capabilities into an established security operations organization is preferred.

• Hands-on experience building or operating agentic AI systems across multiple LLMs, including open-weight, hosted, and frontier models, is preferred.

• Experience applying AI within SAST, AppSec, vulnerability management, detection engineering, or security operations workflows is preferred.

• Working knowledge of safely operating open-weight or less-restricted models for authorized internal security research is a plus.

• Familiarity with frontier AI vulnerability research programs or comparable agentic vulnerability-discovery initiatives is a plus.

• Active participation in AI security research, open-source communities, industry groups, conference speaking, or published research is a plus.

• Relevant certifications in cybersecurity, cloud security, AI/ML security, or detection engineering are beneficial but not required.
  
   

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This posting is for proactive recruitment purposes and may be used to fill current openings or future vacancies within our organization.

What’s in it For You?

• Hybrid Work Model: We’ve adopted a flexible hybrid working environment for our office-based roles while delivering a seamless experience that is digitally and physically connected.
• Flexibility & Work-Life Balance: Flex My Way is a set of supportive workplace policies designed to help manage personal and professional responsibilities, whether caring for family, giving back to the community, or finding time to refresh and reset. This builds upon our flexible work arrangements, including work from anywhere for up to 8 weeks per year, empowering employees to achieve a better work-life balance.
• Career Development and Growth: By fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development, we prepare our talent to tackle tomorrow’s challenges and deliver real-world solutions. Our Grow My Way programming and skills-first approach ensures you have the tools and knowledge to grow, lead, and thrive in an AI-enabled future.
• Industry Competitive Benefits: We offer comprehensive benefit plans to include flexible vacation, two company-wide Mental Health Days off, access to the Headspace app, retirement savings, tuition reimbursement, employee incentive programs, and resources for mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.
• Culture: Globally recognized, award-winning reputation for inclusion and belonging, flexibility, work-life balance, and more. We live by our values: Obsess over our Customers, Compete to Win, Challenge (Y)our Thinking, Act Fast / Learn Fast, and Stronger Together.
• Social Impact: Make an impact in your community with our Social Impact Institute. We offer employees two paid volunteer days off annually and opportunities to get involved with pro-bono consulting projects and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
• Making a Real-World Impact: We are one of the few companies globally that helps its customers pursue justice, truth, and transparency. Together, with the professionals and institutions we serve, we help uphold the rule of law, turn the wheels of commerce, catch bad actors, report the facts, and provide trusted, unbiased information to people all over the world.

Our use of AI within the recruitment process Thomson Reuters utilizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our global recruitment process. Unless you opt-out, our AI system will assess the information provided by you and compare it to the requirements listed for the role, and present the result to our recruitment personnel for further review. The AI system acts as a supporting tool, but there is always a human making the decision if you will be considered for the role.In the United States, Thomson Reuters offers a comprehensive benefits package to our employees. Our benefit package includes market competitive health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance programs, as well as a competitive 401k plan with company match. In addition, Thomson Reuters offers market leading work life benefits with competitive vacation, sick and safe paid time off, paid holidays (including two company mental health days off), parental leave, sabbatical leave. These benefits meet or exceeds the requirements of paid time off in accordance with any applicable state or municipal laws. Finally, Thomson Reuters offers the following additional benefits: optional hospital, accident and sickness insurance paid 100% by the employee; optional life and AD&D insurance paid 100% by the employee; Flexible Spending and Health Savings Accounts; fitness reimbursement; access to Employee Assistance Program; Group Legal Identity Theft Protection benefit paid 100% by employee; access to 529 Plan; commuter benefits; Adoption & Surrogacy Assistance; Tuition Reimbursement; and access to Employee Stock Purchase Plan.Thomson Reuters complies with local laws that require upfront disclosure of the expected pay range for a position. The base compensation range varies across locations.

Eligible office location(s) for this role include one or more of the following: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and/or Irvine, CA; McLean, VA; Washington, DC. The base compensation range for the role in any of those locations is $228,000 USD - $424,000 USD.
For any eligible US locations, unless otherwise noted, the base compensation range for this role is $198,200 USD - $368,000 USD.

Base pay is positioned within the range based on several factors including an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience with consideration given to internal equity. Base pay is one part of a comprehensive Total Reward program which also includes flexible and supportive benefits and other wellbeing programs.
This role may also be eligible for an Annual Bonus based on a combination of enterprise and individual performance.


About Us

Thomson Reuters informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. We serve professionals across legal, tax, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Our products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world leading provider of trusted journalism and news.

We are powered by the talents of 26,000 employees across more than 70 countries, where everyone has a chance to contribute and grow professionally in flexible work environments. At a time when objectivity, accuracy, fairness, and transparency are under attack, we consider it our duty to pursue them. Sound exciting? Join us and help shape the industries that move society forward.

As a global business, we rely on the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of all employees to deliver on our business goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. Thomson Reuters is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer providing a drug-free workplace.

Thomson Reuters makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities, including veterans with disabilities, and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law. If you reside in the United States and require an accommodation in the recruiting process, you may contact our Human Resources Department at HR.Leave-Expert@thomsonreuters.com. Disability accommodations in the recruiting process may include things like a sign language interpreter, making interview rooms accessible, providing assistive technology, or other relevant accommodations. Please note this email is not intended for general recruitment questions and we will promptly respond to inquiries regarding accommodations. More information on requesting an accommodation here.

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More information about Thomson Reuters can be found on thomsonreuters.com