Senior Security Engineer (Detection & Response)

Justworks is looking for an experienced security engineer skilled in detection and response, who can help enhance and mature Justworks’ Security. As a Senior Detection Engineer, you’ll design, build, and maintain the detection logic that powers our platform, conduct proactive threat hunting, and drive continuous improvements across our detection and incident handling workflows. You’ll collaborate closely with IT, Engineering, Platform, and other members of the Security team to identify attacker behaviors, build high‑fidelity detections, and strengthen our defenses.

You’ll also play a key role in designing and conducting table‑top exercises, improving processes, and building automation that reduces friction and accelerates response. You’ll help explore how AI can enhance detection, hunting, and operational efficiency.

Your Success Profile

What You Will Work On

• Build, tune, and deploy high‑quality detections across our platform
• Develop and refine detections using telemetry from EDR, threat intel, endpoint & cloud posture platforms and native AWS cloud services
• Conduct proactive threat hunting to uncover threat actor behaviors and detection gaps
• Lead security event & incident handling, including triage, investigation, containment guidance, and post‑incident improvements
• Build automation and tooling to reduce manual effort and improve detection accuracy
• Drive process improvements across detection engineering, incident response, and telemetry workflows
• Collaborate with Engineering to ensure high‑quality logging and visibility across AWS environments
• Explore and prototype AI‑assisted detection and response capabilities
• Contribute to internal playbooks, documentation, and detection engineering best practices
• Design and conduct table‑top exercises to validate readiness and strengthen response processes
• Note: This position will require participation in an on-call rotation.

How You Will Do Your Work

As a Sr. Detection Engineer, how results are achieved is paramount for your success and ultimately result in our success as an organization. In this role, your foundational knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes are anchored in the following:

• Good judgement - the exercise of critical thinking, analyzing and assessing problems and implications, identifying patterns, making connections of underlying issues, understanding risks and developing mitigation strategies, and taking ownership of the outcome.
• Resourcefulness - taking a can-do approach, even in the face of obstacles and constraints by assessing what’s in front of you and effectively and efficiently optimizing what you have, whether it's working on something new or thinking about how to do something better.
• Teamwork and communication - putting our collective best together through documentation, collaboration, relationship-building, listening, empathy, recruiting, and evangelism.
• Influence and leadership - fostering a community of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, mentorship, and forward-thinking.
• Skills and knowledge - the capacity to actively learn and apply specific domain knowledge, know-how, and best practices to continually enhance and improve.

In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for:

• Camaraderie - Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You’re an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others.
• Openness - Your default is to be open. You're willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You’re curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others.
• Grit - You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You’re committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude.
• Integrity - Simply put, do what you say and say what you'll do. You’re honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example. 
• Simplicity - Be like Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in detection engineering, threat hunting, security event analysis, and incident response
• Strong understanding of attacker behaviors, malware techniques, and modern threat landscapes
• Hands‑on experience with EDR platforms (event analysis, detections, hunting)
• Proficiency with AWS security and logging services (CloudTrail, GuardDuty, IAM, VPC Flow Logs, Lambda, etc.)
• Experience designing and conducting attack & defend (table‑top) exercises
• Demonstrated ability to improve processes, reduce friction, and automate repetitive tasks
• Interest in how AI/ML can enhance detection, hunting, and response workflows
• Strong communication skills and comfort working cross‑functionally in a fast‑paced environment

This role is based in our New York City headquarters. The base wage range for this position will be $167,500 - $235,000 annually.

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