Enterprise Cybersecurity AI Architect

Enterprise Cybersecurity AI Architect Location: Atlanta, GA. or Birmingham, AL (onsite 4 days a week, one day remote) POSITION SUMMARY: Southern Company is seeking a hands-on AI Security Architect with proven experience deploying technology solutions in a complex enterprise environment. The candidate will implement and operationalize the company’s established AI security vision, working with architecture, engineering, cybersecurity, data, and application teams to deliver secure, scalable solutions. The role directly supports efforts to mitigate real and potential cyber threats to the company’s facilities, personnel, technology, operations, and brand—including critical electric and gas utility infrastructure and its privately owned telecommunications network. This position will contribute practical architectural and engineering expertise to protect internally developed AI applications, secure models and data pipelines, and implement guardrails for AI agents deployed across the enterprise. This position is responsible for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the company’s information assets. This will be accomplished by: Establishing and implementing an information security framework and technical architecture. Designing, developing, and implementing information security solutions. Establish and maintain security guardrails to support the safe implementation of AI and automation. Providing Cybersecurity expertise and consulting. The architect will deploy and integrate AI security technologies that improve team efficiency and resilience. Success in this role requires strong implementation engineering skills, experience taking enterprise solutions from design through production, and the ability to translate established architecture and security requirements into reliable operational capabilities. Qualified candidates need to be able to align strategy and execution to increase cybersecurity maturity, anticipate future requirements for complex traditional, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, drive initiatives via influence and relationships into business processes, keep up with current security trends, be focused on results, and be a self-starter.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement and integrate security controls throughout AI development and deployment processes. Implement, configure, test, and maintain guardrails for AI agents used across departments to support safe, compliant, and responsible use. Design, Implement and integrate security architecture for AI platforms, models, and applications, including LLMs, agentic workflows, and custom AI tools. Execute threat modeling and risk assessments for AI systems and translate findings into prioritized, implementable controls aligned with frameworks such as NIST. Architect and build secure deployment environments for AI agents, including sandboxing, access control, secrets management, logging, and runtime isolation. Implement defenses against common attack methods to models and data protection, such as data exfiltration, information disclosure, hallucinations, model poisoning, and excessive overreliance. Establish responsible AI frameworks for fairness, bias detection, and explainability. Deploy, integrate, and operationalize AI-enabled capabilities that enhance cybersecurity operations, such as incident response, threat detection, and vulnerability management. Work with the Cybersecurity Cloud, App, and AI Security Manager to execute the enterprise AI security strategy and deliver defined capabilities and outcomes. Partner with data science, DevSecOps, and application teams to embed security into AI development pipelines. Monitor and respond to security incidents related to AI systems. Conduct regular security assessments and audits to identify vulnerabilities and implement corrective actions. Plan, coordinate, and deliver cybersecurity technology implementations from requirements and design through testing,