Senior Security Detection Engineer

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100* trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

The same principles built into our products are reflected in how our team works: we embrace AI as a core productivity multiplier, with all team members expected to incorporate AI into their daily workflows to drive efficiency, innovation, and impact. GitLab is where careers accelerate, innovation flourishes, and every voice is valued. Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems. Co-create the future with us as we build technology that transforms how the world develops software.

*Fortune 500® is a registered trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, used under license. Claim based on GitLab data. Fortune 100 refers to the top 20% ranked companies in the 2025 Fortune 500 list, published in June 2025. Fortune and Fortune Media IP Limited are not affiliated with, and do not endorse products or services of GitLab.

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.

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the United States only. This range is intended to reflect the role's base salary rate in locations throughout the US. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location. The base salary range does not include any bonuses, equity, or benefits. See more information on our benefits and equity. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary.

United States Salary Range

$139,200—$190,000 USD

How GitLab Supports Full-Time Employees

• Benefits to support your health, finances, and well-being
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Please note that we welcome interest from candidates with varying levels of experience; many successful candidates do not meet every single requirement. Additionally, studies have shown that people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a job unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role, please apply and allow our recruiters to assess your application.

Country Hiring Guidelines: GitLab hires new team members in countries around the world. All of our roles are remote, however some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Talent Acquisition team can help answer any questions about location after starting the recruiting process.

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GitLab is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. GitLab’s policies and practices relating to recruitment, employment, career development and advancement, promotion, and retirement are based solely on merit, regardless of race, color, religion, ancestry, sex (including pregnancy, lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression), national origin, age, citizenship, marital status, mental or physical disability, genetic information (including family medical history), discharge status from the military, protected veteran status (which includes disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans), or any other basis protected by law. GitLab will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. See also GitLab’s EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know during the recruiting process.