Principal Security Engineer

Description: QuantumScape is on a mission to transform energy storage with solid-state lithium-metal battery technology. The company’s next-generation batteries are designed to enable greater energy density, faster charging and enhanced safety to support the transition away from legacy energy sources toward a lower carbon future.

About the team: Our Cybersecurity Team sits at the intersection of innovation and protection. We are a driven, collaborative group of security professionals embedded across the business, working shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering, software, cloud, and automation teams to build security into everything we do from the ground up. If you're passionate about solving hard security problems in a fast-moving, deeply technical environment, you'll feel right at home here.

What we need: We need a security engineer who stays ahead of threats, responds decisively when incidents occur, and builds the systems and processes that make us harder to attack every day. Here's what that looks like in this role:

• Serve as a key responder and coordinator during security incidents, leading investigations from detection through containment, eradication, and recovery
• Build and mature a threat intelligence capability that turns raw signals into actionable insights for the business
• Own vulnerability management end-to-end from discovery and prioritization to driving remediation across engineering and infrastructure teams
• Harden network environments by identifying gaps, enforcing segmentation, and ensuring monitoring coverage across on-premises and cloud-connected infrastructure
• Translate complex threat and risk data into clear, prioritized guidance for both technical teams and senior leadership
• Proactively hunt for threats and misconfigurations before they become incidents
• Communicate with clarity and confidence across all levels of the organization, adapting your message to your audience
• Take problems all the way to resolution not just to identification following through, closing loops, and holding yourself and others accountable

What You’ll do: As a Principal Security Engineer, you will be a key contributor and trusted advisor across incident management, network security, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management. You will partner with cross-functional teams to reduce risk, improve detection and response capabilities, and build a proactive security posture at scale.

Incident Management

• Lead end-to-end incident response activities including triage, investigation, containment, eradication, and post-incident review
• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve incident response plans, playbooks, and runbooks
• Coordinate cross-functional response efforts across IT, engineering, legal, and leadership during active incidents
• Conduct thorough root cause analysis and drive post-incident improvements to prevent recurrence
• Maintain and improve SIEM configurations, alert logic, and detection rules to reduce noise and improve fidelity
• Track incident metrics and report on response trends, dwell time, and program maturity over time

Network Security

• Assess and harden network architecture across on-premises and cloud-connected environments, ensuring alignment with security best practices
• Design and enforce network segmentation strategies, including zero-trust principles and perimeter controls
• Monitor network traffic for anomalous behavior and lead investigation of network-based threats
• Partner with IT and infrastructure teams on firewall policy management, VPN architecture, and secure remote access controls
• Evaluate and improve network visibility tooling including IDS/IPS, NDR, and packet capture capabilities
• Provide security guidance on network architecture decisions, including SD-WAN, cloud interconnects, and OT/IT boundary controls

Threat Intelligence

• Build and operationalize a threat intelligence program that delivers timely, relevant, and actionable intelligence to security and engineering teams
• Collect, analyze, and synthesize intelligence from internal telemetry, open-source feeds, commercial platforms, and industry sharing communities (e.g., ISACs)
• Develop threat profiles and adversary models relevant to QuantumScape's industry, technology stack, and risk landscape
• Drive intelligence-informed detections by translating TTPs into SIEM rules, detection logic, and hunting hypotheses
• Produce and deliver threat briefings to technical teams and senior leadership with clear, prioritized recommendations
• Support proactive threat hunting activities using threat intelligence to guide hypothesis generation and investigation

Vulnerability Management

• Own and mature the vulnerability management program across cloud, on-premises, and endpoint environments
• Operate and tune vulnerability scanning tools (e.g., Tenable, Qualys, or equivalent) to ensure comprehensive and accurate coverage
• Develop risk-based prioritization frameworks that account for asset criticality, exploitability, and business context
• Partner with engineering, IT, and cloud teams to drive timely remediation and track progress against SLAs
• Produce clear vulnerability reporting and dashboards for both technical owners and leadership stakeholders
• Identify systemic gaps and structural risk drivers and recommend durable remediation strategies beyond patch-by-patch fixes

Advisory & Cross-Functional Enablement

• Act as a security advisor to engineering, infrastructure, and IT teams translating complex security requirements into practical, actionable guidance
• Influence technology decisions, architecture reviews, and vendor assessments from a security lens
• Communicate risk clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Foster a culture of security ownership and accountability across the organization

Skills You’ll Need:

Experience:

• 10 years of hands-on experience in cybersecurity, with demonstrated depth across incident response, network security, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management
• Proven experience leading security incident investigations and coordinating cross-functional response efforts.
• Track record of building or maturing security programs from initial gap identification through operationalization in complex, fast-paced environments
• Experience working alongside engineering, IT, and infrastructure teams in a security advisory or embedded capacity

Technical Skills:

• Incident Response & SIEM: Hands-on experience with SIEM platforms including Google SecOps (Chronicle), Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender; ability to develop and tune detection rules, correlation logic, and response automation
• Endpoint & Network Protection: Experience deploying and managing application allowlisting and endpoint control tools such as ThreatLocker; working knowledge of AI-driven network detection and response platforms such as Darktrace
• Network Security: Strong working knowledge of network protocols, firewall management, IDS/IPS, NDR tools, and network segmentation principles
• Threat Intelligence: Experience with CTI frameworks (MITRE ATT&CK, Diamond Model), threat feeds, and intelligence platforms; ability to produce structured intelligence products
• Vulnerability Management: Proficiency with vulnerability scanning platforms including Tenable (Nessus / Tenable.io / Tenable.sc) and experience building risk-based remediation workflows across cloud and on-premises environments
• Scripting & Automation: Proficient in Python and/or PowerShell for building detection logic, automation workflows, and security tooling integrations
• Cloud Platforms: Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure and/or GCP security services and logging capabilities, including integration with Google SecOps for cloud-native detection and response
• Operating Systems: Solid experience across Linux and Windows environments

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (required)

Certifications:

• CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) preferred
• Relevant certifications such as GCIH, GCFA, GCIA, GCTI, or equivalent advanced certifications are strongly considered.

ONSITE: This position is required to work onsite 5 days per week to meet the minimum essential duties and requirements of this position.

Compensation & Benefits: The expected salary range for this role is from $155,000 to $236,000 and a final salary will be determined by the candidate's experience and educational background. QuantumScape also offers an annual bonus and a generous RSU/Equity package as part of its compensation plan. In addition, we do offer a tremendous benefits plan including employee paid health care, Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP), and other benefits.