Senior Detection Engineer, Protective Services

About this role

About the Team

DoorDash is one of the world's most trusted on-demand logistics platforms. The Global Safety and Security team exists to keep it that way, protecting our people, property, operations, brand, and reputation across all our markets. We manage risk and create value through agility, technology, and a people-first approach. Our DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Wolt brands now span more than 40 countries, dozens of offices, and tens of thousands of employees. Protective Services focuses specifically on the safety of our executives, their families, and the operations that support them. Its detection engineering function brings together enterprise, marketplace, open-source, and physical security signals to identify threats that do not fit within a traditional SOC boundary. This role builds the detection capabilities that turn those signals into timely, actionable information for Protective Services.

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Detection Engineer to build and improve the technical capabilities Protective Services uses to identify threats to protected individuals. You will develop detections, pipelines, enrichment, and automation across enterprise security telemetry, marketplace signals, open-source information, and physical security systems. This detection problem extends beyond conventional cybersecurity alerts. Relevant indicators may appear across identities, endpoints, cloud environments, support interactions, marketplace activity, access-control events, or unstructured online content. You will determine how to combine those signals, distinguish meaningful escalation from noise, and directly investigate resulting activity alongside Protective Services partners. That proximity to active cases grounds engineering decisions in real investigative needs and reveals opportunities to improve fidelity, automate friction, and reduce time to action. This is a hands-on security engineering role. You will work in code, queries, data pipelines, detection repositories, and production systems; carry detections from hypothesis through deployment and optimization; and use operational outcomes to improve coverage and quality. This role reports to the Engineering Manager, Protective Services, and requires participation in an on-call rotation.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…

• 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

We’re excited about you because you have…

• 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,…