Staff Security Engineer – Cyber Governance & Automation

This role is designed for a staff‑level security practitioner with deep Cyber Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) expertise who shapes the vision, strategy, and outcomes of GEICO’s cyber governance automation capabilities. The Staff Security Engineer owns the end‑to‑end automated cyber governance program, including defining and delivering the roadmap for continuous control monitoring and validation, scalable evidence collection, and real‑time audit readiness across GEICO’s hybrid cloud and on‑prem environments. 

This position partners closely with engineering and platform teams to translate complex regulatory, policy, and control requirements into prioritized, well-defined automation capabilities, ensuring solutions are scalable, sustainable, and aligned to enterprise risk priorities. Success in this role means turning governance requirements into durable, outcome driven products that demonstrate control effectiveness and reduce audit friction. 

Cyber Governance Product & Program Ownership 

• Contribute to the vision, strategy, and roadmap for GEICO’s cyber governance automation capabilities, driving delivery through prioritized execution and continuous improvement. 

• Define how policies, standards, regulatory frameworks, and technical controls are operationalized and continuously validated through automated evidence collection. 

• Own governance automation platforms end‑to‑end as the system of record for control health, evidence, and audit readiness across cloud and on‑prem environments. 

• Drive near‑100% automation coverage, including designing scalable on‑prem automation strategies and governing compensating controls where full automation is not feasible, while maintaining audit defensibility. 

• Define and enforce governance standards for automation coverage targets, evidence SLAs, control performance metrics, and telemetry requirements. 

• Own the governance automation roadmap, prioritizing work based on risk reduction, regulatory requirements, and operational efficiency. 

• Establish and operationalize a standardized, risk‑based remediation lifecycle, including severity classification, timelines, escalation paths, closure criteria, and enforced SLAs. 

• Maintain ownership of remediation scheduling frameworks and forward‑looking visibility into upcoming deadlines. 

• Ensure all non‑compliance is consistently tracked, prioritized, and driven to closure through scalable workflows. 

• Partner with compliance, risk, audit, and engineering leaders to ensure governance capabilities align with enterprise risk priorities and regulatory obligations (e.g., NYDFS, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, SOC, ISO). 

• Act as the single point of accountability for governance automation outcomes, including executive‑level risk, remediation, and audit‑readiness reporting with forecasting. 

Technical Strategy & Product Stewardship 

• Own the product strategy and direction for GEICO’s Automated Cyber Governance capabilities, ensuring clear system‑of‑record definitions, scalability expectations, and alignment to long‑term enterprise needs. 

• Partner with engineering and platform teams to define and prioritize governance automation capabilities, providing product requirements, architectural guardrails, and acceptance criteria rather than performing direct system development. 

• Define and maintain integration principles, system boundaries, and data standards to ensure reliable, secure, and consistent evidence flows across cloud platforms, security tools, and internal systems. 

• Evaluate and guide the responsible use of AI capabilities within governance platforms (e.g., evidence classification, control mapping suggestions, risk summarization), ensuring explainability, auditability, and alignment with regulatory expectations. 

• Serve as the primary point of accountability for governance automation outcomes, working with engineering leaders to resolve complex platform challenges and ensure solutions remain reliable, sustainable, and fit for purpose. 

• Ownership of 100% source system adoption feeding governance evidence (e.g., cloud, IAM, logging, asset inventory) 

• Accountability for identifying and closing: Missing telemetry, Integration gaps, Inconsistent or unreliable data sources, Enforcement of standardized telemetry and data requirements across teams 

• Ownership of automated control quality assurance, including False positive / false negative reduction, Control tuning, Drift detection 

• Ensuring all automated evidence is Audit‑defensible, Traceable, Aligned to regulatory intent 

• Ownership of control change management for new and modified controls 

• Translating regulatory, policy, and control changes into: Engineering requirements 

• Implementation guidance, Evidence expectations 

• Proactive stakeholder communication: What is changing, Why it matters, Compliance deadlines, Tracking and escalating control adoption readiness risks 

Automation & Continuous Control Monitoring 

• Define how security policies, standards, and control requirements are translated into automated, continuously monitored control capabilities, including clear requirements, success criteria, and evidence expectations. 

• Establish standards and expectations for automated detection of control non‑adherence, and partner with engineering and remediation teams to ensure appropriate remediation guidance, workflows, or integrations are in place. 

• Ensure evidence outputs are audit‑ready, traceable, repeatable, and aligned to regulatory intent, materially reducing reliance on point‑in‑time, manual evidence collection. 

• Apply AI‑assisted techniques to improve control validation and evidence quality, such as anomaly detection, evidence completeness checks, control drift identification, and signal prioritization across large control populations.  

• Leverage AI‑enabled insights to reduce noise and surface material control failures, ensuring governance automation focuses on true risk rather than generating low‑value alerts. 

Cross‑Functional Leadership & Enablement 

• Serve as a trusted partner and advisor to engineering, infrastructure, cloud, and security teams by providing clarity on governance requirements, regulatory intent, and how they are operationalized through scalable solutions. 

• Influence partner teams to adopt a product‑ and automation first approach to governance, compliance, and policy adherence, reducing manual effort and improving consistency across the enterprise. 

• Communicate complex technical and regulatory concepts clearly to a broad range of stakeholders, including engineers, risk and audit partners, and executive leadership. 

• Contribute to raising the organization’s governance, automation, and product maturity through guidance, enablement, and cross‑functional collaboration. 

Program Maturity & Continuous Improvement 

• Continuously assess governance automation capabilities, processes, and supporting tools to identify opportunities to scale adoption, increase automation coverage, and improve effectiveness. 

• Own the definition and evolution of cyber governance metrics and reporting, including dashboards that provide clear visibility into control health, automation coverage, audit readiness, and risk posture for executive and stakeholder audiences. 

• Track product and program outcomes, identify gaps against regulatory and risk objectives, and prioritize improvement initiatives that advance maturity quarter over quarter. 

• Incorporate AI‑driven insights into governance metrics and reporting, such as trend analysis, control health forecasting, or remediation prioritization, to improve executive visibility and decision-making. 

• Promote continuous learning and best practice sharing across cyber governance, risk, audit, and engineering communities to improve consistency, effectiveness, and long-term sustainability. 

Metrics, Reporting & Executive Insight 

• Establishes and enforces the cyber governance metric model that directly drives control effectiveness, remediation accountability, and enterprise risk reduction. The Staff Security Engineer has clear ownership of defining, standardizing, and operationalizing metrics that are automation‑backed, auditable, and actively used to hold teams accountable 

Accountable for defining and owning core governance metrics, including: 

• Automation coverage (%) across regulatory and internal control sets 

• Continuous vs. manual control execution ratio 

• Evidence freshness and SLA adherence for automated controls 

• Control failure rates and recurrence trends 

• Remediation mean time to resolution (MTTR) 

• Tool, control, and automation adoption and utilization rates 

• SLA adherence by severity tier for policy, control, and regulatory findings 

Executive reporting produced by this role: 

• Clearly ties automation outcomes to measurable risk reduction 

• Demonstrates sustained, real‑time audit readiness and control health 

• Quantifies operational efficiency gains from automation, including reduced manual effort, faster remediation, and fewer audit‑driven escalations 

 Required Qualifications 

• 6+ years of experience across Cyber Governance, Risk, and Controls (GRC), with demonstrated ownership of complex, cross functional programs or products that deliver measurable compliance and risk outcomes. 

• Proven experience defining, scaling, and evolving governance automation or compliance platforms, including ownership of outcomes such as control validation, evidence quality, and audit readiness. 

• Strong technical fluency with cloud platforms, integrations, and automation concepts, with the ability to partner effectively with engineering teams to define requirements and evaluate implementation approaches (without direct system development responsibility). 

• Deep understanding of major security and compliance frameworks (e.g., NIST CSF, NYDFS 500, PCI DSS, SOC, ISO 27001) and the ability to translate regulatory expectations into scalable governance capabilities. 

• Demonstrated ability to lead and align complex initiatives across GRC, engineering, risk, and audit stakeholders, with accountability for outcomes, adoption, and long‑term sustainability. 

Technical Skills 

• Strong technical fluency across modern engineering concepts, with the ability to partner effectively with engineering teams on the design and delivery of scalable governance automation capabilities. 

• Experience owning and scaling off‑the‑shelf automated governance and compliance platforms (e.g., Drata, Vanta or similar), including defining control mappings, evidence models, automation coverage targets, and integration strategy. 

• Working knowledge of APIs, authentication mechanisms (e.g., OAuth, SAML), and common data formats (e.g., JSON, XML), sufficient to define requirements, evaluate approaches, and assess integration feasibility. 

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, and/or GCP) and an understanding of how security controls are implemented, validated, and evidenced within cloud environments. 

• Exposure to containers, cloud‑native services, and CI/CD environments to support informed decision‑making and collaboration (nice to have). 

• Experience applying or governing AI‑assisted capabilities within security, cyber governance or risk platforms, with an understanding of model limitations, data quality considerations, and audit implications 

What Success Looks Like 

• Cyber governance controls and evidence are continuously monitored, validated, and audit‑ready, with minimal reliance on manual or point‑in‑time processes. 

• Engineers and control owners experience reduced audit friction, clear expectations, and repeatable governance workflows embedded into standard operating practices. 

• Leadership has clear, reliable visibility into control health, risk posture, and remediation progress through consistent, trusted metrics. 

• Governance automation capabilities scale with the business and adapt quickly to changing regulatory requirements, risk priorities, and technology evolution.