Senior AI Defense Engineer (2316-437)

WilmerHale is a leading full-service international law firm with 1000 lawyers located throughout 12 offices in the United States and Europe. Our lawyers work at the intersection of government technology and business and we remain committed to our guiding principles of providing quality excellent legal and client services developing diversity among our lawyers and staff and cultivating an environment that promotes an ambitious spirit collaboration and collegiality by drawing on the extraordinary talents and dynamic experience of our lawyers. Our goal is to reflect the diversity of our clients and the communities in which we practice.

About the Role

The Senior AI Defense Engineer is a technical leader responsible for securing AI in a global law firm environment. This role is responsible for setting technical direction driving delivery and mentoring colleagues to raise their awareness and capabilities.

The role will translate emerging AI threats into practical defenses guardrails policy enforcement layers monitoring and detections adversarial test automation and hardened environments that hold up under real attacker pressure. The role will support a smart-integration buy-before-build security strategy. You will evaluate select and operationalize commercial AI security solutions that meet stringent legal-sector expectations including matter confidentiality ethical walls client audit requirements data residency constraints and contractual information technology service obligations.

Success looks like

The role also enables progress by enhancing and performing commercial AI tool evaluations and approvals assessing internally developed AI solutions and responding to growing audit demands with credible evidence of AI cybersecurity protections. Additionally success includes:

• Secure-by-default adopted by engineering teams
• Adversarial evaluation and assessments that reliably finds issues before production
• Telemetry and detections that catch abuse early
• An AI security roadmap that stays current with fast-moving technology shifts

What You Will Be Doing

### Threat Modeling & Risk Assessment

• Guide and conduct technical threat modeling for AIML systems neural networks expert systems retrieval-augmented generation classification models etc.
• Identify and document AI-specific threats with emphasis on how vendor controls gateways content filters policy engines etc. mitigate prompt injection data leakage jailbreaks and unsafe autonomy.
• Provide clear prioritized mitigation guidance to colleagues via vendor configuration standards reference patterns and exception processes.

### AI Defense Engineering

• Evaluate and operationalize security controls guardrails and enforcement mechanisms for AI services e.g. inputoutput filters policy enforcement layers content safety checks rate limiting abuse detection.
• Enable detections and monitoring for AI-specific attack patterns using logs telemetry and model signals.
• Work with platform teams to secure the integration and operational use of enterprise AI services including protection of credentials data flows storage and access controls across Copilot and other commercial LLM platforms.

### Adversarial Testing & Red Teaming

• Identify and utilize adversarial test suites for AI applications prompt libraries fuzzing harnesses automated attack campaigns.
• Simulate realistic attacker behavior targeting AI endpoints and agents capture and track issues as actionable vulnerabilities.
• Partner with application and product teams to validate fixes re-test and track residual risk.

### Tooling & Automation

• Ensure AI capabilities are incorporated into the existing and future security stacks SIEM SOAR EDR WAF API gateways identity platforms.

### Incident Response & Forensics for AI Systems

• Serve as technical lead for security incidents that involve AI services e.g. abuse data exfiltration via AI systems compromised API keys poisoned training data.
• Analyze logs and model behavior to reconstruct attack paths and define durable fixes.
• Improve playbooksrunbooks and lead post-incident technical reviews.

### Collaboration

• Serve as the AI security technical lead with engineering product infrastructure and security leadership.
• Communicate tradeoffs clearly align stakeholders and unblock delivery.
• Provide technical input into AI security standards and guidelines staying grounded in implementation and operational constraints along with emphasizing vendor capability fit maintainability and total cost of ownership TCO.

### Roadmap Leadership

• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for AI security engineering.
• Translate threat intelligence and risk assessments into prioritized engineering work milestones and measurable outcomes.
• Lead technical design reviews set standards for secure AI architecture and ensure high-quality implementation supportability and operational readiness.

Contributes to the Firms Service Matters initiative to consistently improve its image internally and externally. Displays professionalism quality service and a can-do attitude to internal members departments of the Firm as well as external clients and vendors via electronic and print correspondence over the telephone and in-person.