Senior Principal Engineer - Agentic Security (all genders)

Role: Senior Principal Security Engineer for Agentic Security at Zalando. You will be at the forefront of securing how Zalando builds, deploys, and operates AI agents at scale, defining what safe, trustworthy, and well-governed agentic AI looks like. You will ensure a security-by-design approach for agentic systems, considering security and governance throughout their lifecycle—from model and tool selection, through agent identity and authorization, to runtime controls, guardrails, monitoring, and accountability. As part of Application Security's leadership team, you will influence the security architecture of Zalando and a larger engineering organization, translate emerging AI regulation and internal policy into practical technical controls, and set the technical direction for this fast-moving area. Responsibilities: - Drive the security architecture, standards, and guardrails for agentic and AI-powered systems across engineering teams, covering agent identity, authorization, tool and function-call usage, and boundaries of autonomous action. - Lead the design and conceptual work on our agentic identity broker, defining how humans, services, and agents authenticate, are authorized, and are scoped when accessing AI models and capabilities. - Continuously evolve threat modeling and risk assessment for agentic systems, addressing prompt injection, excessive agency, data exfiltration, and model and tool supply-chain risks, and make security reviews for AI scalable and impactful. - Partner with Legal, Privacy, Compliance, and Risk to shape acceptable-use policies, model and agent approval processes, and AI review/governance forums. - Mentor and guide principal engineers in best practices for AI and application security, and share knowledge within the engineering and security community. - Consult and collaborate with cross-functional teams and other Principal Engineers to integrate security considerations into every step of building and operating agentic systems. - Dive deep and go hands-on with engineering teams in their code and technical designs, and engage in discussions on system design and security architecture trade-offs. - Scan the horizon for developments in agentic AI, LLM security, AI regulation, and the evolving threat landscape, and feed them into standards, guardrails, governance, and the Zalando Tech Radar. Qualifications: - Expert knowledge of security architecture, industry trends, and scaling yourself to a large organization. - Strong understanding of AI/ML and agentic systems security—LLMs and their integration patterns, tool use and function calling, prompt injection, agent identity and authorization, and guardrails—or a strong security architecture background with the eagerness to go deep in this domain. - Solid understanding of IAM, cloud security, containerization technologies, and secure software development practices. - Excellent communication skills and experience in leading organization-wide collaborations on security. - Ability to understand the business context where teams operate and the customer problems being solved. - Broad experience in software engineering or adjacent fields exposed to large-scale engineering projects. What We Offer: - 27 days of holiday a year to start for full-time employees (+1 day for every calendar year up to 30 days) - 40% off fashion and beauty products sold and shipped by Zalando, 30% off Lounge by Zalando, discounts from external partners - Family support, including counselling and dedicated services for parents and carers - Company pension scheme - Employee shares programme - Health and wellbeing options, including Wellhub - Mental health support and coaching - Development through our training platform and biannual peer-to-peer review - 2 paid volunteering days a year - Relocation assistance (subject to prior agreement)