Director, Threat Detection & Response

FanDuel•New York City, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

FanDuel is seeking a Director of Threat Detection & Response to lead teams and programs responsible for securing FanDuel’s platforms, data, and customers. This highly visible, senior leadership role involves defining strategy, leading high-performing teams, and partnering cross-functionally with Product, Fraud, and Customer Operations to translate risk signals into clear, decisive action. The Director will build the operational maturity to scale with one of the fastest-growing companies in sports gaming. The role spans four critical security domains: Security Operations Engineering, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence, and Vulnerability Management. The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background in building detection systems, running incident response, and understanding security engineering excellence, while also being effective at advising executives and operating at a board-room scale. This position offers significant ownership, ambiguity, and the opportunity to build something that truly matters.

Requirements

Built and scaled security operations functions — in fast-paced, product-driven environments — and have the outcomes and metrics to show for it.
Led multi-functional security organizations — including managers and senior ICs, and you know how to cultivate high performance without burning people out.
Have real engineering depth — in at least one of these domains: detection engineering, security automation, SIEM/SOAR platforms, or threat intelligence — and you can credibly engage with your teams at a technical level.
Led response to serious security incidents — and your teams come out of them better than they went in — with improved playbooks, tooling, and process to prove it.
Are a strong cross-functional operator — who knows how to partner with engineering, product, and fraud teams to move at the speed a consumer business requires.
Turn ambiguity into structure — you’ve built programs and frameworks where none existed, and you’ve made them stick across a complex organization.
Communicate risk in a way that moves people — clear, confident, and grounded in data — whether you’re in a post-incident review or presenting to the C-suite.

Nice To Haves

Background in regulated or consumer-facing industries — fintech, gaming, e-commerce, or similar — where speed and trust are equally non-negotiable.
Experience building cloud-native detection and security engineering capabilities at scale (AWS, GCP, or Azure environments).
Familiarity with adversary simulation, red team operations, or offensive security methodologies — even without direct program ownership.
Prior ownership of threat intelligence programs or vulnerability management at an organization with a broad, complex attack surface.
A track record of redefining how security effectiveness is measured — with program health framed around engineering throughput, automation coverage, and risk reduction rather than analyst activity.
Experience applying AI, ML, or large-scale automation to detection and response — whether building models, integrating intelligent tooling, or rearchitecting how the team triages and contains threats.
Experience in high-growth or startup environments where you’ve had to build capability faster than the threat landscape moves.

Responsibilities

Lead and scale high-performing teams across Security Operations Engineering, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence, and Vulnerability Management — including senior managers and staff-level ICs.
Define and drive a unified security operations strategy that aligns detection, response, intelligence, and risk reduction into a coherent, outcome-driven program.
Build and mature engineering-led capabilities: SIEM/SOAR platforms, detection-as-code practices, behavioral analytics, threat intel pipelines, and automated response playbooks.
Apply adversary-centric frameworks — MITRE ATT&CK, threat modeling, adversary emulation — to continuously evolve coverage, reduce dwell time, and improve detection fidelity.
Partner closely with Fraud, Product, and Customer Operations to align on shared threat surfaces, incident response coordination, and risk signal sharing across the business.
Develop and mentor senior managers and ICs; build a culture of technical excellence, psychological safety, and clear accountability.
Communicate operational risk, security posture, and program outcomes to executive leadership with precision — translating signals into decisions, not noise.
Define and deliver OKRs anchored in engineering output and risk reduction: detection coverage expansion, automation containment rates, signal precision, and detection-as-code deployment velocity — not analyst throughput or ticket volume.
Champion an AI-first approach to security operations — integrating automation, ML-driven detection, and intelligent triage to compound the team’s impact without linearly compounding headcount.
Drive continuous improvement in process, tooling, coverage, and incident readiness — including post-incident reviews that produce measurable program changes, not just documentation.
Evaluate and evolve the security tooling stack — partnering with vendors and internal engineering teams to ensure capabilities keep pace with the threat landscape and support a code-first operating model.
Perform other such duties as assigned by the Company.