Senior Security Detection Engineer

An overview of this role

You will join the growing Detection Engineering team at GitLab - responsible for building and maintaining a best in class detection engineering program. If you love writing threat detections, hunting for patterns of behavioral anomalies across GitLab corporate, cloud and customer environments as well as closing detection gaps you find, this team is for you! We thrive on writing, maintaining and testing our library of threat detections with a focus on automation, LLM aided efficiencies, and behaviors over atomic indicators.

We’re looking for an engineer with strong experience building and deploying threat detections using agentic AI capabilities - if you’ve built end to end agentic powered detection pipelines, we want to talk to you! Bonus points if you are experienced in writing SaaS application detections, double bonus points if that application is GitLab! Part of this role will be focused on customer threat detection - turning GitLab threat insights into actionable customer alerts.

Find out more about the Detection Engineering team and some of our publications:

• Build an automated detection testing framework with GitLab CI/CD and Duo
• Automating detection gap analysis with GitLab Duo Agent Platform
• Unveiling the GUARD framework to automate security detections at GitLab
• Automating cybersecurity threat detections with GitLab CI/CD

What you’ll do

• Identify MITRE ATT&CK/top threat actor detection gaps and write behavioral detections to close them
• Be a detection SME and deeply understand GitLab’s detection methodology, DaC framework, detection types, and quality thresholds
• Act as a “detection architect” - orchestrating agents across the entire detection lifecycle and ensuring detection quality and consistency
• Use a SIEM/data lake platform like Splunk or Elastic to write and troubleshoot threat detections
• Collaborate with peer GitLab teams to identify and close security observability improvement opportunities
• Collaborate with incident response, red team, as well as threat intelligence to cross functionally improve GitLab’s detection program and coverage
• Use, maintain, and build new DaC, AI, and process efficiency automations for the signals engineering program

What you’ll bring

• An understanding of the GitLab application, bonus points if you are comfortable detecting and hunting for attacks against GitLab or if you’ve maintained GitLab yourself.
• SOC, incident response or detection engineering expertise
• SIEM/security data lake detection and query expertise
• A proven ability to proactively detecting potentially malicious patterns and collaborating with incident response to complete incident RCAs to identify and implement new detection opportunities
• Strong Cloud (AWS/GCP) and some PaaS (Kubernetes/terraform) experience
• Experience orchestrating teams of agents to write detections - bonus points for experience building full end to end agentic detection pipelines
• Bring a passion for deep dive threat threat hunting and cross functional purple teaming and turning results into detections
• Experience with mature detection capabilities such as: Detections as Code, Signal vs detection development, risk based alerting, and behavior analytics.

Due to government requirements, you must be a United States Citizen (defined as any individual who is a citizen of the United States by law, birth, or naturalization) to fill this position.

About the team

Detection Engineering is tasked with detecting suspicious and malicious events for GitLab, our customers and our SaaS operating environments. The Detection Engineering team works closely with peer teams in Security operations to simulate attack patterns, respond to incidents, and consume threat intelligence as well as collaborating with expanded teams across GitLab’s engineering teams to improve security observability capabilities for the GitLab product.