Senior Manager - Protective Services

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 is the function accountable for the safety of the people we protect and the environments they live and work in, wherever they are.

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior Manager, Protective Services to lead protective operations, reporting to the Director, Protective Services. This is as much a build-and-execute mandate as a leadership one. You own the decisions that keep protection working, including how teams are staffed and assigned, how protection is set for a given person and situation, what we spend and which vendors we use, what people are trained to do, and how incidents get handled.

This is a player-coach role, and the coaching half does not keep you off the field. You will work advances, travel with the people we protect, and take your turn in the rotation while setting the standard the team works to. Protection here is a service. It works when the people we protect can move through their lives with as little friction as we can manage, and when they trust the team enough to tell us what we need to know.

You own protective operations, training and standards, vendor management, incident response, and converged physical-cyber protection. Protective teams, intelligence, and cybersecurity work on the same problem simultaneously, and detection and intelligence capabilities drive our protective posture. 

Success in the first year means a tight operating rhythm, training and qualification standards that hold up against the best protective programs, a team that is current and deployable on short notice, and protective decisions driven by intelligence rather than reaction.

You are excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Lead protective operations. Own staffing, assignment, protective decisions, resourcing, and response across the full scope of the program. Lead from within the work rather than from above it, and be accountable for how it performs.
• Own training and standards. Set what people are trained on, qualified in, and expected to keep current, then verify it is happening and hold the records that prove it. Build a team that deploys on short notice and stays that way.
• Own vendor and supplier management. Decide what we need and from whom, run competitive procurement, and set approval thresholds. Where a supplier is part of how we protect someone, they meet our standard.
• Own incident response. Be the escalation point for protective events within your authority and make real-time calls on protection and resourcing. Escalate immediately on legal exposure, law enforcement involvement, or risk that reaches other teams, and write down what was decided and why.
• Lead converged physical-cyber protection. Work with Protective Intelligence and Cyber Protective Services to read threat indicators and judge what testing and assessment findings actually mean. When a threat starts online, you decide how protection answers it.
• Earn trust and keep friction low. Build relationships with the people we protect, their families, and their teams to make protection something they rely on rather than tolerate. Design the friction out, so we ask less of them for the same result.

We are excited about you because you bring…

• Leadership and operating experience. Ten or more years in protective, security, or military operations, including five or more years managing people with hands-on responsibility for protective operations. You have held real decision authority, not advised someone who held it, and you are still close enough to the work to run it yourself.
• Judgment under pressure. You make sound calls with incomplete information in fast-moving, high-consequence situations, and the record of those decisions holds up under later review.
• Building, not inheriting. A track record of building or scaling protective capability and setting the standards, qualifications, and procedures other leads work to.
• Breadth of scope. Experience running more than one protective discipline or program at the same time, including through other leads, accountable for cost, method, and staffing across all of it. 
• Technical fluency across physical and cyber security. You do not need to be a security engineer, but you need to think like one. You understand how networked systems are put together and how someone would go about taking them apart, you are comfortable with network security concepts, access control, surveillance, and residential security technology at the operational level, and you can tell whether a proposed fix actually closes the gap it claims to.
• Service orientation and discretion. You have earned the confidence of the people you protect and the people close to them, and you have kept it. You handle sensitive information about who is protected, how, and where without exception.
• Working well across teams. A record of partnering with intelligence, cybersecurity, legal, and business teams on matters that go beyond your authority.
• Availability. Willingness to travel around 35 percent, with peaks near 50 percent, often on short notice, and to pick up the phone on protective events and serious escalations outside working hours.
• Physical readiness for the work. The ability to stay on your feet and moving for long stretches across offices, residences, venues, and transit, to lift and carry equipment up to 50 pounds, to assist or move a person to safety, to work in tight spaces and sit in vehicles and aircraft for extended periods, to see and assess people, vehicles, and conditions at distance and in poor light, to communicate clearly in loud environments, and to drive in heavy traffic and bad conditions.
• Endurance for the conditions. The ability to work outdoors and in transit in extreme heat, extreme cold, inclement weather, and crowds for as long as the work takes, to work irregular and long hours including nights, weekends, and holidays on short or broken sleep and across time zones, and to keep making good decisions while doing it.
• Education. Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience.

We expect this position to be filled by 10/13/2026.

The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado. 164000 - 230000 USD