Cybersecurity Engineer
Fully Remote Chicago, IL
Description

  

Company

Sayers is a value-added solution provider in the practice areas of security, networking, cloud, and IT infrastructure. Sayers is a very dynamic and flexible company with a unique work culture dedicated to delivering to our clients at the highest levels and teaming with an expert engineering team. Sayers has built a reputation for providing innovative IT solutions with a personal touch.  

Sayers attracts among the most experienced and accomplished IT professionals in the business. We offer a unique and powerful opportunity for technology leaders looking to advance their career: work with major corporations, solving complex challenges with the latest and most sophisticated solutions. However, we are boutique-sized and entrepreneurial, so our employees get to focus on doing the work and building their expertise - not red tape and meetings.

We hire thoughtfully and deliberately, concentrating on candidates who want to grow their career here - who have the right skills and experience, but also align with our culture and share our core values: Trust, Experience, Collaboration, Client Focus and Delivering Results. We value and reward our people, and we invest in them for the long-term, providing compelling training and certification opportunities, as well as career path identification, coaching and mentoring. 


Role Overview

We are seeking a Cybersecurity Engineer who is intrinsically motivated, intellectually curious, and deeply passionate about protecting modern enterprise environments. This role is ideal for a self-starter who has demonstrated a sustained, self-directed pursuit of cybersecurity mastery and thrives in hands-on, end-user–side engineering roles.


The ideal candidate naturally hunts for risk, questions assumptions, and proactively identifies opportunities to strengthen defenses. They are excited by technology, inspired by continuous learning, and eager to explore how automation, AI-driven analysis, and intelligent monitoring can dramatically increase security impact—effectively enabling a small team to operate with outsized capability.


This role will collaborate across IT, engineering, and business stakeholders to design, implement, and continuously evolve a comprehensive security program that aligns with organizational risk tolerance and business priorities.


Key Responsibilities

  • Design, implement, and maintain security controls across endpoints, identity systems, networks, applications, and cloud platforms
  • Actively identify security gaps, emerging threats, and systemic weaknesses through continuous analysis and investigation
  • Engineer and refine security detection, alerting, response, and monitoring capabilities, emphasizing automation and scalability
  • Build and maintain security playbooks, standards, procedures, and operational documentation
  • Partner with IT and business teams to embed security into daily operations, workflows, and lifecycle processes
  • Evaluate and recommend security technologies based on effectiveness, risk reduction, and operational fit
  • Leverage automation, scripting, and AI assisted techniques to improve visibility, response time, and threat detection fidelity
  • Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, and post incident improvement efforts
  • Translate complex technical risks into clear, actionable insights for both technical and non technical stakeholders
  • Continuously research emerging threats, tools, and defensive techniques, applying learnings back into the environment


Required Experience & Background

  • At least (5) years experience working inside an enterprise environment, supporting and securing real world end user systems
  • Demonstrated progression toward becoming a cybersecurity professional through hands on experience, self directed learning, labs, certifications, research, or personal projects
  • Practical experience with enterprise security tooling, operational processes, and layered defense strategies
  • Experience collaborating with IT operations, identity, infrastructure, and application teams
  • Proven ability to work independently, prioritize effectively, and drive initiatives from idea to execution


Requirements

Security Engineering & Operations

  • Endpoint, identity, and access security concepts
  • Threat detection, investigation, and response workflows
  • Vulnerability management and risk remediation
  • Security architecture and layered defense design


Systems & Infrastructure

  • Modern operating systems (user and server)
  • Cloud and hybrid environments
  • Networking fundamentals and traffic analysis
  • Logging, telemetry, and event correlation


Automation & Intelligence

  • Scripting or automation to reduce manual security work
  • Experience designing workflows that respond to security signals automatically
  • Curiosity and experimentation with AI assisted analysis, agents, and intelligent monitoring
  • Ability to think in terms of scale and repeatability rather than one off fixes


Security Program Maturity

  • Translating policy into enforceable technical controls
  • Documentation, standards, and security playbooks
  • Continuous improvement mindset over “set it and forget it”


Strategic & Communication Skills (Highly Valued)

  • Ability to think holistically about security risk, not just tools
  • Comfortable explaining security concepts to non technical audiences
  • Strong written communication skills for documentation, analysis, and executive level summaries
  • Ability to influence without authority and collaborate across teams
  • Balanced mindset: security driven, but pragmatic and business aware


Ideal Mindset & Traits

  • Naturally curious; asks “why” and “what if”
  • Proactively seeks problems rather than waiting for tickets
  • Passionate about cybersecurity as a craft, not just a job
  • Comfortable operating with autonomy and accountability
  • Energized by learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement
  • Views automation and AI as force multipliers, not replacements


What Success Looks Like in This Role

  • Security gaps are identified before they become incidents
  • Detection and response are increasingly automated, intelligent, and scalable
  • Security is embedded into operations, not bolted on
  • Stakeholders trust security guidance because it is clear, pragmatic, and aligned with business needs
  • The security program demonstrably matures over time