Senior Engineer - Security, Compliance & Policy Engineering

IBM

IBM

Compliance / Regulatory

California, USA · Texas City, TX, USA

Posted on Apr 15, 2026
Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

We are building a core platform that enforces safety, policy, and compliance across all infrastructure and agent operations. This role owns the policy engine, identity layer, and audit/compliance foundations that make autonomous and supervised systems secure, auditable, and regulator‑ready.

You will design and implement a declarative policy engine that enforces safety tiers, agent constraints, and approval gates; build authentication and authorization for both humans and AI agents (OIDC, RBAC, mTLS); and deliver compliance frameworks and evidence pipelines suitable for regulated environments (PCI‑DSS v4.0 at GA).

What You’ll Do

  • Build a unified policy enforcement stack spanning authentication, RBAC, transport safety, and per‑agent policy envelopes.
  • Design policy as auditable, declarative configuration (YAML), including safety tiers and resource‑level controls.
  • Implement enterprise‑grade identity: OIDC/SAML SSO, RBAC roles, agent identity via certificates and mTLS, and gateway‑level ACLs.
  • Deliver the compliance evidence framework, including PCI‑DSS v4.0 control mappings and auditor‑ready evidence exports (JSON/CSV/PDF).
  • Implement drift detection between declared and observed infrastructure state, with guided remediation and approval workflows.
  • Harden audit infrastructure with structured, signed, immutable logs using FIPS‑aligned cryptography.

What the First 90 Days Look Like

Month 1: Onboard onto the codebase. Understand the existing safety tier enforcement, transport-level safety controls, and unified audit logging. Review design documents covering the compliance evidence framework, SSO/RBAC design, and agent policy architecture. Map the gap between current implementation and compliance readiness requirements. Deliver policy engine MVP — safety tier enforcement via a generic policy framework.

Month 2: Implement RBAC. Build the compliance evidence framework. Begin PCI-DSS v4.0 control mapping implementation. Stand up OIDC authentication path alongside existing session tokens.

Month 3: Ship PCI-DSS control mappings. Implement drift detection engine. Begin evidence export (JSON/CSV). Implement per-connection ACLs on the gateway proxy. Ship audit log enhancements (structured, signed records).

Required education
High School Diploma/GED
Preferred education
Bachelor's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise

· Security engineering experience. You’ve built authentication, authorization, or policy enforcement systems. OIDC, RBAC, certificate-based auth, session management — you’ve implemented at least some of these in production.

· Compliance intuition. You don’t need to be a GRC analyst, but you understand how regulatory control requirements (PCI-DSS, SOX, HIPAA, NIST) translate into technical enforcement and evidence collection. You know what auditors need.

· Go proficiency. The policy engine, auth layer, and audit system are Go. You can be productive in Go from day one.

· You think adversarially. You design for the failure case. You write tests that try to break things. You think about what happens when the policy is misconfigured, the token is expired, or the agent tries something it shouldn’t.

Preferred technical and professional experience

You don’t need all of these coming in. The team will bring you up to speed:

· IBM Z security architecture (RACF, LDAP, SSH key management on z/OS) and mainframe security models

· Our safety tier enforcement model and how it integrates with the gateway proxy

· Agent policy envelopes — how to bound what AI agents can do within their sessions

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Software infuses core business operations with intelligence—from machine learning to generative AI—to help make organizations more responsive, productive, and resilient. IBM Software helps clients put AI into action now to create real value with trust, speed, and confidence across digital labor, IT automation, application modernization, security, and sustainability. Critical to this is the ability to make use of all data, because AI is only as good as the data that fuels it. In most organizations data is spread across multiple clouds, on premises, in private datacenters, and at the edge. IBM’s AI and data platform scales and accelerates the impact of AI with trusted data, and provides leading capabilities to train, tune and deploy AI across business. IBM’s hybrid cloud platform is one of the most comprehensive and consistent approach to development, security, and operations across hybrid environments—a flexible foundation for leveraging data, wherever it resides, to extend AI deep into a business.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

ABOUT IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being

- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs

- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law

- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals

- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.

IBM will not be providing visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future. Therefore, in order to be considered for this position, you must have the ability to work without a need for current or future visa sponsorship.

The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.

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