Senior Detection & Response Engineer - Threat Hunting Lead

New Zealand Government; Wellington; On-site; NZD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working arrangements

Five weeks annual leave

Professional development

Job summary

NZ Transport Agency | Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is seeking three Principal Engineers, Detection and Response to strengthen its cyber defence through advanced threat detection, threat hunting and incident response. This senior, hands-on role combines engineering excellence with technical leadership across SIEM, XDR and EDR to improve detection coverage and protect critical services from cyber risk.

Working across regions and partners, you will drive automation, playbooks and safe deployment practices

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, tuning and maintaining detection rules, correlation logic or behavioural analytics.
• Experience investigating suspicious activity and threat hunting using telemetry and threat intel.
• Familiarity with MITRE ATT&CK framework and threat intelligence fundamentals.
• Experience with automation to improve security workflows and safe deployment.

Responsibilities

• Design, tune and maintain detection rules, correlation logic and behavioural analytics across SIEM, XDR and EDR.
• Lead threat hunting activities and translate threat intel into actionable detections.
• Identify detection gaps and drive continuous improvement of the detection capability.
• Develop automation, SOAR playbooks and response workflows to improve security operations.
• Set quality standards and validate detection content before deployment.
• Provide specialist guidance for security tool evaluations and incident response.
• Act as tactical responder for significant cyber incidents, supporting containment and recovery.

Skills

Detection engineering

Threat hunting

Incident response

Automation scripting

MITRE ATT&CK

Cross-functional influence

Tools

SIEM

XDR

EDR

SOAR

Job description

NZ Transport Agency | Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is seeking three Principal Engineers, Detection and Response to strengthen its cyber defence through advanced threat detection, threat hunting and incident response. This senior, hands-on role combines engineering excellence with technical leadership across SIEM, XDR and EDR to improve detection coverage and protect critical services from cyber risk.

Working across regions and partners, you will drive automation, playbooks and safe deployment practices