Detection Engineer, Senior

Booz Allen Hamilton•Fort Meade, MD

21h

About The Position

The Opportunity: We’re looking for a self‑motivated, hands‑on self‑starter who thrives in environments where threat signals are noisy, adversaries evolve quickly, and high‑fidelity detections directly improve mission outcomes. In this role, you’ll design, build, test, and maintain production‑grade detections across diverse data sources—endpoint, network, identity, SaaS, and cloud—while applying Detection‑as‑Code (DaC) practices to ensure consistency, scalability, versioning, and automation. You’ll collaborate closely with incident responders, hunters, and platform engineers to map rules to MITRE ATT&CK, maintain coverage dashboards, and continuously iterate on fidelity and performance. This is a high‑impact engineering role where curiosity, ownership, and precision are essential. Join us. The world can’t wait.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in a security engineering function, such as detection engineering, SOC analytics, or threat hunting
Experience contributing to shared rule and detection repositories
Experience authoring detections in two or more of the following: Sigma, YARA, Suricata, Splunk SPL, KQL, or SQL/DB‑SQL
Experience applying Detection‑as‑Code (DaC) best practices, such as Git workflows, pull requests, automated linting, CI pipelines, unit tests, and metadata enforcement
Experience with detection versioning, semantic versioning, changelogs, and ruleset lifecycle management
Experience building detections across multiple log sources and platforms, such as EDR/XDR, SIEM, cloud telemetry, and identity providers
Ability to demonstrate map detections to MITRE ATT&CK techniques and communicate coverage effectively to stakeholders
Ability to communicate detection logic clearly, document rationale, and collaborate with SOC, IR, and engineering partners
Ability to obtain a Secret clearance
HS diploma or GED

Nice To Haves

Experience operating within a mature DaC program with standardized rule formats, metadata schemas, test harnesses, and CI/CD promotion gates
Experience with adversary simulation or detection validation frameworks, such as automated test harnesses, replay testing, or red or blue collaboration workflows
Experience with cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, cloud logging architectures, and SIEM or XDR platforms such as Sentinel, Chronicle, or Elastic
Experience with scripting and programming in Python or Go for detection utilities or automation
Knowledge of data models, such as ECS and CIM, normalization pipelines, and building portable detections across platforms
Knowledge of MITRE ATLAS for AI‑relevant threat behaviors and integrating ATT&CK and ATLAS coverage models
GCIA, GCTI, GCDA, GMON, or similar certifications

Responsibilities

design, build, test, and maintain production‑grade detections across diverse data sources—endpoint, network, identity, SaaS, and cloud
applying Detection‑as‑Code (DaC) practices to ensure consistency, scalability, versioning, and automation
collaborate closely with incident responders, hunters, and platform engineers to map rules to MITRE ATT&CK
maintain coverage dashboards
continuously iterate on fidelity and performance