Description
We're transforming the grocery industry
At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community.
Overview
Instacart's Detection Engineering team sits at the core of our Security organization, building and operating the systems that identify, surface, and respond to threats across one of North America's largest grocery technology platforms. We own the full detection lifecycle, from telemetry collection and signal design to automated response, across a complex, cloud-native environment spanning endpoint, cloud, container, and SaaS.
As a Senior Detection Engineer II, you'll be a technical anchor on the team: developing high-fidelity detection logic, hunting for novel attacker techniques, and raising the bar for how we think about coverage, quality, and scale. You'll work closely with Engineering, Red Team, Incident Response, Fraud, and Trust & Safety to ensure our detections reflect real-world adversary behavior; not just signatures.
Responsibilities
- Develop, tune, document, and maintain detection logic across multiple log sources including endpoint, cloud, container, and SaaS products.
- Assist in cyber forensic investigations across a variety of log sources.
- Optimize log ingestion pipelines and telemetry collection to ensure high-quality, actionable security data while managing volume and cost.
- Design and build SOAR playbooks and automation workflows to streamline detection triage, enrichment, and response actions.
- Mentor junior security analysts and detection engineers on threat hunting methodologies, detection logic development, and investigation techniques.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience in a detection engineering, incident response, or offensive security role.
- Experience with 1 or more public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Deep understanding of attacker TTPs across modern zero trust environments, including identity compromise, token theft, and abuse of trust boundaries.
- Proficient understanding of macOS internals and telemetry available to identify macOS specific threats.
- Experience implementing detection-as-code workflows including version control, peer review processes, automated testing, and CI/CD deployment pipelines.
- Basic proficiency with Python, Golang, or other programming languages.
Benefits
- Highly market-competitive compensation
- New hire equity grant
- Annual refresh grants
- Flexible remote work policy