AI Agent Abuse Prevention Engineer

Job Description

Zendesk is hiring a Senior Stafflevel technical leader to own detection mitigation and governance of abuse stemming from AI agents across Zendesks products and customer integrations. You will combine hands-on offensive and defensive skills with product sensibility to design secure agent architectures and champion company-wide and engineering changes to prevent AI agent-enabled abuse.

Key responsibilities

• Threat strategy & modeling

  • Lead threat modeling for AI agent features integrations and APIs (prompt injection jailbreaks data leakage automated workflow abuse).

  • Maintain an evolving attacker playbook specific to AI agents.

• Technical leadership & engineering collaboration

  • Design and prototype mitigation controls (e.g. input/output sanitization provenance tracing policy gates token/session lifetimes capability scoping sandboxing).

  • Work with Platform Product and SDK teams to bake secure defaults into agent SDKs apps and API flows.

• Detection & prevention

  • Build anomaly detection rules telemetry and behavioral analytics to surface anomalous agent activity and abuse patterns.

  • Partner with security teams to instrument key signals and automate high-confidence containment actions.

• Incident response & forensics

  • Act as a subject-matter expert for investigations involving AI agents; define containment eradication and customer communications playbooks.

• Stakeholder engagement & external representation

  • Collaborate with Legal/Privacy for compliance Product for roadmap trade-offs and Customer Success for mitigation support.

  • Represent Zendesk in industry forums on agent safety/security and contribute to standards/best practices where appropriate.

Required qualifications

• 10 years of professional experience in cybersecurity software engineering or ML security with demonstrable hands-on experience.

• Deep understanding of application/API security OAuth/token lifecycle session management and modern auth patterns.

• Practical experience with LLMs/agents: understanding of prompt engineering risks injection attacks and mitigation approaches for model-based systems.

• Strong track record leading cross-functional technical initiatives and influencing product decisions.

• Excellent communication skills can translate technical risk into product legal and business terms.

• Experience at a SaaS company with a customer support platform.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with incident response and forensic investigations involving data exfiltration or API abuse.

• Prior role building agent safety trust & safety or ML security programs.

• Background in privacy compliance frameworks (SOC2 GDPR) or experience working with Legal/Compliance.

• Advanced degree in CS Security or related field and/or relevant certifications (OSCP CISSP etc.).

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $240000.00-$360000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus benefits or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities applicable experience and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles) and do not include bonus benefits or related incentives.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working enables us to purposefully come together in person at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world to connect collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer and were proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity equity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race color religion national origin age sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation marital status medical condition ancestry disability military or veteran status or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application complete any pre-employment testing or otherwise participate in the employee selection process please send an e-mail to with your specific accommodation request.