Head of Threat-Informed Cyber Defence & Engineering

Booking.com; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual paid time off

Hybrid working

Booking.com product discounts

Job summary

Booking.com is seeking a senior leader to shape and run the cyber defence program in Amsterdam, unifying threat research and detection engineering into scalable, production-grade capabilities. You will drive strategy, ownership of metrics, and collaboration with cross-functional partners across Enterprise IT, product security, and infrastructure.

You will oversee an on-call rotation, apply adversary emulation, and lead a team of experienced researchers and engineers to reduce risk and accelerate

Qualifications

• 5+ years in cybersecurity, security engineering, threat research, or detection & response.
• 2+ years directly managing engineers, researchers, or other senior technical specialists.
• Real breadth across threat hunting / research / adversary emulation and detection engineering / telemetry / SIEM / SOAR / response automation.

Responsibilities

• Shape strategy in partnership with leadership - translate the broader Cyber Defence strategy into a clear, risk-based plan for the team, set priorities, and own resource assignment and capacity planning so the team works from one aligned plan.
• Expand coverage where it counts most - lead the push for high-value telemetry and detection coverage across crown jewels, identity, cloud, and areas lacking visibility, with focus on maturity and gaps.
• Establish detection & response engineering at scale - bring detection engineering into practice with detection-as-code, peer review, testing, CI/CD, tuning, and production-ready capabilities.
• Run validation as a program - own adversary-emulation and control-validation to surface gaps and drive closure, sharpening investigation speed and quality.
• Own the metrics - design, track, and report KPIs like ATT&CK coverage, detection quality, false positives, automation impact, and risk reduction.
• Use AI as a force multiplier - drive automation to ship detections faster and reduce manual toil, enabling experts to focus on complex problems.
• Lead exceptional people - a people-first leadership approach with coaching and development.
• Build visibility & partnerships across the business - articulate program value to senior leadership and collaborate across Enterprise IT, product security, and infrastructure.

Skills

Threat hunting

Adversary emulation

Detection engineering

MITRE ATT&CK

Stakeholder communication

People leadership

Tools

SIEM

SOAR

Telemetry pipelines

Job description

Booking.com is seeking a senior leader to shape and run the cyber defence program in Amsterdam, unifying threat research and detection engineering into scalable, production-grade capabilities. You will drive strategy, ownership of metrics, and collaboration with cross-functional partners across Enterprise IT, product security, and infrastructure.

You will oversee an on-call rotation, apply adversary emulation, and lead a team of experienced researchers and engineers to reduce risk and accelerate