Detection Engineer - Protective Services

About the Team

DoorDash is one of the world’s leading on-demand logistics platforms. Across DoorDash, Deliveroo, and Wolt, our operations span more than 40 countries, dozens of offices, and tens of thousands of employees.Global Safety and Security helps protect our people, property, operations, brand, and reputation across that footprint, using technology, agility, and a people-first approach to stay ahead of evolving risks. Within the team, Protective Services focuses on the safety of our executives, their families, and the operations that support them. Our detection engineering function brings together enterprise, marketplace, open-source, and physical security signals to identify threats that don’t fit neatly within a traditional SOC boundary. This role builds the detection capabilities that turn those signals into timely, actionable intelligence - and helps Protective Services find what matters before it becomes something bigger.

About the Role

Detection engineering looks a little different here.

As a Detection Engineer on Protective Services, you’ll build the technical capabilities that help identify and investigate threats to protected individuals. The signals you’re looking for won’t live neatly in one place—they may surface across identities and endpoints, cloud environments, marketplace activity, support interactions, physical access events, or open-source information.

You’ll connect those signals to find what matters. That means building detections, enrichment, and automation; separating meaningful risk from noise; and investigating what you uncover alongside Protective Services partners.

This is a hands-on engineering role where you’ll work across code, queries, data pipelines, detection repositories, and production systems. You’ll take detections from an initial hypothesis through deployment and tuning, then use what happens in the real world to make them better.

You’ll have ownership of well-understood problems while partnering with senior engineers when the technical complexity, evidence, or potential impact calls for deeper judgment.

This role reports to the Engineering Manager, Protective Services, and participates in an on-call rotation.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Translate threat intelligence, incidents, investigative needs, and observed behavior into production detections that surface meaningful risk, reduce noise, and provide actionable context.
• Build, test, deploy, tune, and maintain detections and supporting pipelines using source-controlled engineering practices designed to operate reliably at scale.
• Correlate signals across enterprise telemetry, marketplace activity, physical security events, OSINT, support interactions, and other relevant data to identify and prioritize potential threats.
• Apply rules, statistical methods, machine learning, and LLM-based techniques where they improve detection quality, prioritization, or investigative context.
• Investigate detections by querying and correlating data, validating hypotheses, and assessing confidence, scope, and potential impact in partnership with Protective Services.
• Follow detections through investigation and resolution, using outcomes, false positives, missed indicators, and investigative friction to continuously improve detection logic, tooling, and workflows.
• Contribute to technical reviews, testing, documentation, standards, and automation that strengthen the reliability and maintainability of the detection function.
• Participate in on-call and support major investigations, clearly communicating the confidence and limitations of available signals.

We’re excited about you because you have…

• 3+ years of experience in detection engineering, threat hunting, incident response, security operations engineering, technical threat intelligence, or software engineering applied to security problems.
• Experience contributing to production detection pipelines using source control, testing, review, deployment, and monitoring practices.
• Proficiency in SQL or a security query language and the ability to write maintainable code in Python, Go, or another relevant language.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to explore unfamiliar datasets, assess data quality, troubleshoot across systems, and turn threat information into testable detection hypotheses.
• Experience triaging alerts and investigations, correlating signals across data sources, assessing confidence and scope, and clearly communicating what the evidence supports.
• Experience building detections or conducting investigations using security, behavioral, or other relevant telemetry. Exposure to identity, endpoint, cloud, marketplace, physical security, OSINT, or unstructured data is a plus.
• Experience using automation or analytics to improve detection and investigation workflows; familiarity with machine learning or LLM-based techniques is a plus.
• Familiarity with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK or D3FEND and their use in organizing detection coverage and identifying gaps.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, investigative, and response teams and handle sensitive information appropriately.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with Snowflake, Cortex, or Google SecOps is preferred.

We expect this position to be filled by 28 November 2026.

The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado. 130600 - 192000 USD