Security Engineer (Detection & Response)

Headway

2d•$182,750 - $215,000

About The Position

The Security Engineer will join Headway’s Detection & Response team, which is responsible for protecting the security and privacy of therapists, patients, and payer partners. The role builds capabilities to identify, respond to, and contain threats across production and corporate environments, including maintaining adequate and accessible logging, real-time detections and alerting, and documented, rehearsed incident response practices. The position scales security capabilities alongside the volume of data Headway generates and consumes. It includes applying automation and AI where they are genuinely useful while recognizing when other approaches are more appropriate. The engineer will work autonomously and collaboratively across technical and nontechnical teams, contribute to security operations and education, and help improve team processes and documentation. Headway is a mental healthcare technology company whose mission is to increase access to high-quality mental healthcare. The company serves providers and patients across all 50 states.

Requirements

At least 1–2 years of dedicated experience with security response and automation responsibilities, or a security-adjacent engineering background.
At least 4–5 years in related areas such as DevOps, IT, or software engineering, with concrete security responsibilities or overlap.
Comfort scripting or coding to build and automate tools.
Experience with logging, detection, or observability platforms in a cloud or distributed environment.
Sound judgment about when AI and automation are useful and when deterministic tools or human judgment are better.
Ability to thrive in an asynchronous, high-autonomy environment and prioritize work independently.
Strong collaboration skills with technical and nontechnical teams, including the ability to understand detection and response needs and manage several projects at once.
Motivation by Headway’s mission of increasing access to high-quality mental healthcare.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a regulated environment such as healthcare, finance, or federal government.
Experience with automation or SOAR tooling.
Detection-as-Code or Infrastructure-as-Code experience.
A track record of prioritizing and shipping risk-based detections, conducting threat modeling, or building alert pipelines.

Responsibilities

Build and refine detections, logging and telemetry coverage, and security tooling, including SIEM and ETL pipeline improvements, to provide real-time visibility into anomalous and malicious activity across cloud, corporate, and SaaS environments.
Run incident response activities, threat hunting, and threat modeling, and improve incident processes and documentation.
Implement automation and AI when appropriate, and help define Headway’s approach to AI-forward detection and response without overusing AI.
Triage security alerts and develop familiarity with Headway’s environment to distinguish meaningful signals from noise.
Participate in the security on-call rotation.
Author runbooks and document detections, logging capabilities, response processes, and threat intelligence.
Contribute to security education and partnerships across engineering.
Mentor peers.