Principal Security Awareness & Human Risk Engineer

An overview of this role

The Principal Security Awareness & Human Risk Engineer is a strategic individual contributor role within GitLab's Security Assurance team. The role owns GitLab's global security awareness and education program and drives measurable reduction in human-related security risk — moving the program beyond completion-rate compliance toward sustained behavior change and embedded security culture.

What You’ll Do  

• Own and evolve the global security awareness and education program, spanning annual, new-hire, role-based, targeted, executive, and microlearning content.
• Lead the phishing simulation program end to end — design, deployment, analysis, and targeted follow-up.
• Apply behavior change principles to reinforce secure habits and address priority risk behaviors.
• Build and sustain security culture through learning campaigns, Security Awareness Month, and ongoing engagement.
• Produce multimedia awareness and education content, including video.
• Administer the training and phishing platforms, owning program data and reporting end to end.
• Define and report performance indicators to Security Assurance leadership.
• Own vendor relationships for phishing, secure coding (OWASP) training, and video production.
• Lead market and competitor evaluations, renewal decisions, and cost negotiation, recommending in-house builds where commercial options underperform.
• Collaborate on and maintain security policies, standards, and procedures.
• Coordinate audit evidence and demonstrate control effectiveness.
• Track remediation of identified gaps to closure.

What You’ll Bring 

• A minimum of 10 years' experience building or scaling global awareness and human-risk programs in a large, globally distributed enterprise, with measurable outcomes; regulated-industry experience preferred.
• SANS Security Awareness Professional (SSAP) certification, or equivalent demonstrated expertise in building, maintaining, and measuring a mature awareness program.
• Demonstrated experience running enterprise-scale phishing programs and organization-wide awareness campaigns.
• Track record of evaluating, selecting, consolidating, or replacing security training vendors, including cost and value analysis.
• Instructional design capability
• Working knowledge of security policy development, audit support, and control evidence.
• Ability to influence enterprise strategy across technical and non-technical teams without formal authority.
• Ability to make complex security topics practical and engaging in an all-remote organization.
• Track record of onboarding, managing, and negotiating with third party vendors.

About the team

The Security Assurance organization helps GitLab build and maintain trust by strengthening how we approach security, compliance, and risk across the company. The Security Risk team sits within that group and owns third-party risk (TPRM), security risk assessments, and remediation of security findings. The Security Risk Team performs thorough, collaborative, and efficient risk assessments as well as drive risk reduction so that GitLab can achieve its goals while maintaining a high level of security. Security Risk counterparts are Security Compliance, Security Governance and Security Enablement functions.