Director, Security Operations & Detection Engineering

Who we are

Auroras mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely quickly and broadly.

The Aurora Driver will create a new era in mobility and logistics one that will bring a safer more efficient and more accessible future to everyone.

At Aurora you will tackle massively complex problems alongside other passionate intelligent individuals growing as an expert while expanding your knowledge. For the latest news from Aurora visit or follow us on LinkedIn.

What we are looking for

We are searching for a Director of Security Operations & Detection Engineering to lead and unify Auroras Detection & Response (D&R) and Security Operations Center (SOC) functions under our Technical Assurance division. This role owns the strategy roadmap and operating rigor for how Aurora detects triages investigates and responds to threats across Onboard (vehicle) Cloud and Enterprise environments - spanning both the engineering that builds our detection capability and the 24x7 operations that run it. This is a strategic people-leadership role. You will set direction build and scale a multi-team organization and represent cyber defense to executive stakeholders.

In this role you will

• Own end-to-end leadership of the D&R and SOC teams including engineers and analysts across detection engineering incident response and 24x7 monitoring/triage.

• Own 24x7 staffing model on-call rotations and resource allocation across time zones to ensure continuous coverage; participate in leadership escalation on-call as needed.

• Define and drive the multi-year strategy and roadmap for detection engineering threat hunting incident response and security operations.

• Stay close enough to the technology (SIEM EDR NDR SOAR cloud-native and vehicle/embedded environments) to make architecture and prioritization calls review technical strategy with your leads and step in on the highest-stakes technical problems or incidents.

• Own end-to-end incident response posture - from detection through containment eradication recovery and post-incident reviews. Serve as the executive point of contact for cybersecurity incidents and audits.

• Oversee cloud vulnerability management: ensure findings are triaged by severity/exploitability owners are assigned and remediation or compensating controls are tracked to closure against SLAs.

• Oversee design development and implementation of detections tooling and Cross Functional projects that touch Cloud Enterprise and On-Vehicle D&R/SOC.

• Own and report on KPIs telemetry coverage alert fidelity and SOC efficiency and maturity to executive leadership.

Required qualifications

• 15 years of progressive cybersecurity experience including 6 years leading managing and scaling detection engineering and security operations teams.

• Current hands-on experience with detection engineering threat hunting or incident response sufficient to credibly guide technical strategy and support your team.

• Strong working knowledge of SIEM EDR NDR/SOAR and modern detection and response tooling. Strong understanding of cloud-native environments (AWS Kubernetes) and enterprise/endpoint security (Linux macOS Windows).

• Deep knowledge of the MITRE ATT&CK framework NIST CSF and modern adversarial techniques.

• End-to-end incident management experience driving cross-departmental collaboration through high-severity incidents.

• Experience with vulnerability management including triage/prioritization of findings and driving remediation across engineering teams.

• Demonstrated experience building a metrics/reporting program from scratch (defining metrics implementing measurement and coaching a team to deliver insight rather than raw data) for a technical function.

• Working proficiency in Python and/or C.

• Experience building and maintaining security data lakes and big data tooling (e.g. AWS Athena Snowflake SQL/data warehousing).

• Experience designing and implementing Zero Trust Architecture.

• Experience with low-level data collection frameworks (e.g. auditd sysmon eBPF).

• Familiarity with systems architecture distributed systems and microservices and with performance monitoring/capacity planning for network operations.

• Experience with DevSecOps CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g. Git Terraform).

Desirable qualifications

• Experience with vehicle/embedded or OT security or strong willingness to ramp up quickly in this area.

For roles based in Mountain View CA and Seattle WA: The salary range for this position is $247000 - $396000 per year.

For roles based in Pittsburgh PA: The salary range for this position is $223000 - $357000 per year.

Auroras pay ranges are determined by role level and location. Within the range the successful candidates starting base pay will be determined based on factors including job-related skills experience qualifications relevant education or training and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future. The successful candidate will also be eligible for an annual bonus equity compensation and benefits.

Working at Aurora

At Aurora we bring together extraordinarily talented and experienced people united by the strength of our values. We operate with integrity set outrageous goals and build a culture where we win together all without any jerks.

We believe in-person work increases collaboration empathy and our ability to lead effectively. As a result Aurorans are expected to work from the office at least 3 days per week with some roles requiring more frequent in-office presence up to 5 days per week based on operational needs.

Our Careers page provides insight into what it is like to work at Aurora and you can find all the latest updates in our Newsroom.

Our commitment to safety

At the core of everything we do is our commitment to safety. Building best-in-class self-driving technology will take time and we believe that each employee at Aurora has a role in contributing to safety every step of the way. Aurora expects commitment to our safety policies from every employee and seeks candidates who take an active responsibility can contribute to building an atmosphere of trust and invest in the organizations long-term success by prioritizing working safely no matter what.

Our commitment to inclusion

Aurora considers candidates without regard to their race color religion national origin age sex gender gender identity gender expression sexual orientation marital status pregnancy status parent or caregiver status ancestry political affiliation veteran and/or military status physical or mental disability or any other status protected by federal or state law. Aurora considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable federal state and local law. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability you may contact us at .

For California applicants information collected and processed as part of your application and any job applications you choose to submit is subject to Auroras California Employment Privacy Policy.

Required Experience:

Director