Senior Detection Engineer, Protective Services

DoorDash USA

9d•$159,800 - $235,000

About The Position

The Global Safety and Security team at DoorDash is responsible for protecting the company's people, property, operations, brand, and reputation across all its markets. The Protective Services division within this team focuses on the safety of executives, their families, and supporting operations. The detection engineering function within Protective Services integrates various security signals (enterprise, marketplace, open-source, and physical) to identify threats that fall outside traditional Security Operations Center (SOC) boundaries. This role is crucial for developing the detection capabilities that transform these signals into timely and actionable information for the Protective Services team.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in detection engineering, alert development, threat hunting, incident response, security operations engineering, technically oriented threat intelligence, or software engineering applied to security problems.
Direct experience building, maintaining, and operating production detection-as-code pipelines using source control, testing, review, deployment, and monitoring.
A proven track record building automation that measurably improves detection accuracy, speed, or investigative quality.
Demonstrated experience building agents or LLM-backed tooling to solve detection or investigation problems, including evaluating quality, reliability, and failure modes.
Strong investigative judgment, including translating incomplete threat information into testable hypotheses, evaluating competing explanations, and communicating what the evidence supports.
Experience building detections across diverse security or behavioral datasets, with the ability to assess data quality and quickly learn unfamiliar sources.
Familiarity with telemetry relevant to protective investigations, such as marketplace activity, physical access, alarms, video, OSINT, or support interactions; expertise across every source is not expected.
Extensive knowledge of cloud-based and distributed systems, including troubleshooting across queries, code, pipelines, and source systems.
Experience working with global and cross-functional partners, including Protective Services, investigators, incident response, insider risk, and threat hunting teams.
Mastery of SQL or SIEM query languages such as SPL or KQL, and proficiency writing maintainable code in Python, Go, or another relevant language.
Experience using MITRE ATT&CK, D3FEND, or similar frameworks to assess detection coverage and communicate gaps while prioritizing real threat behavior and operational outcomes.
Excellent communication, presentation, and stakeholder management skills, sound discretion with sensitive information, and a commitment to mentoring other engineers.
A bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Snowflake, Cortex, or Google SecOps is preferred.

Responsibilities

Conduct hands-on detection engineering for Protective Services, translating threat intelligence, investigative needs, known incidents, and observed behavior into high-quality custom alerting.
Implement risk-based analytics that reduce unnecessary alert volume, prioritize meaningful threats, and give investigators the context to act.
Build, test, deploy, and operate detection-as-code pipelines that support reliable detection at DoorDash’s scale.
Integrate enterprise telemetry, marketplace activity, physical security events, OSINT, support interactions, and other external signals into detections tailored to protective use cases.
Work with structured and unstructured data, applying rules, statistical methods, machine learning, and LLM-backed techniques where they measurably improve detection and investigation.
Develop and maintain automation and agentic tooling that improve detection efficacy, streamline investigative workflows, and reduce repetitive work.
Own the detection lifecycle from hypothesis and data validation through deployment, tuning, measurement, and retirement; maintain detection repositories and use case libraries.
Conduct technical triage and investigations, correlate signals across sources, assess confidence and scope, and help Protective Services partners determine the appropriate response.
Follow detections through investigation, response, and mitigation, using case outcomes, false positives, and missed indicators to improve detection coverage and quality.
Coordinate with internal and external partners on threats targeting DoorDash and lead projects that strengthen protective capabilities across DoorDash brands.
Create and maintain engineering standards, testing practices, and documentation that improve service consistency and reliability.
Mentor and uplevel other engineers through technical reviews, knowledge sharing, and hands-on collaboration.
Participate in our on-call rotation and support significant protective cases.