Cloud & AI Security Engineer

Job Purpose

Herc Rentals is one of the largest equipment rental suppliers in North America, supporting construction, industrial, and infrastructure customers nationwide. Our Cybersecurity team protects the people, customers, systems, and data that keep that business running.

Joining us means working with a modern, cloud-first security stack, an emphasis on AI and automation, a collaborative team, and real opportunities to grow your career in cloud security engineering.
Short Description
Herc Rentals is seeking a skilled and forward-thinking Cloud & AI Security Engineer to join our Cybersecurity team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining secure cloud infrastructure across our enterprise environment, with a strong emphasis on leveraging artificial intelligence and automation to enhance our security posture and protecting against advanced threats.

You will serve as a key technical contributor in protecting Herc Rentals' cloud-hosted systems, data, and applications from evolving cyber threats while ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements and industry best practices.

What you will do...

Cloud Security Architecture and Engineering

• Design and implement security controls, policies, and guardrails across cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and related platforms.
• Develop and maintain secure cloud architecture patterns for infrastructure, applications, and data pipelines.
• Configure and manage cloud-native security services including identity and access management (IAM), encryption, network segmentation, and logging.
• Conduct regular security assessments, architecture reviews, and threat modeling for cloud workloads.

AI and Automation Integration

• Implement data governance and data loss prevention (DLP) controls for AI systems to prevent sensitive data — including customer PII, contracts, and financial information — from leaking into prompts, model training data, or third-party model APIs.
• Discover, assess, and govern the use of unsanctioned AI and SaaS tools ("shadow AI") across the organization, establishing approval, monitoring, and offboarding processes to reduce data exposure and compliance risk.
• Define and enforce safe data-handling standards for prompt and model-response content across internally built and vendor-provided AI services.
• Leverage AI and machine learning tools to enhance threat detection, anomaly detection, and automated incident response capabilities.
• Build and maintain security automation workflows to reduce manual effort and accelerate response times across the security operations lifecycle.
• Evaluate and implement AI-powered security platforms and tools, ensuring they are deployed securely and aligned with Herc Rentals' standards.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI-driven insights to improve vulnerability management, access governance, and cloud compliance monitoring.

Security Operations and Incident Response

• Monitor cloud environments for security events, misconfigurations, and anomalous activity using SIEM and cloud-native monitoring tools.
• Participate in incident response activities, including investigation, containment, remediation, and post-incident review for cloud-related security events.
• Collaborate with the broader Cybersecurity team to develop and refine playbooks, runbooks, and response procedures.

Compliance and Risk Management

• Ensure cloud environments comply with applicable regulatory frameworks and standards, including NIST CSF, CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2, and PCI DSS.
• Conduct risk assessments and vulnerability analyses for cloud-hosted systems and AI workloads.
• Partner with IT, DevOps, and application teams to integrate security into the software development lifecycle and cloud deployment pipelines (Dev