Senior Threat Detection & Incident Response Engineer

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi; Wellington; On-site; NZD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Five weeks annual leave

Income Protection and Critical Illness

Professional development and career成长

Job summary

NZ Transport Agency (Waka Kotahi) seeks three Principal Engineers, Detection and Response to enhance the cyber defence capability through advanced threat detection, threat hunting and incident response. You’ll work across SIEM, XDR and EDR platforms to strengthen detection, reduce time to detect threats and protect critical services from cyber risk.

This senior role blends hands-on engineering, technical leadership and tactical response.

Qualifications

• Senior detection engineering across SIEM/XDR/EDR platforms.
• Investigate suspicious activity and hunt threats using telemetry and threat intel.
• Apply threat insights to improve detections; MITRE ATT&CK familiarity is beneficial.
• Experience using automation or scripting to improve security workflows; SOAR experience advantageous.
• Provide technical guidance and review detection content to strengthen practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, tune and maintain detection rules, correlation logic and behavioural analytics.
• Lead threat hunting activities and translate threat intelligence into actionable detection content.
• Identify detection coverage gaps and drive continuous improvement across 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 expertise for security tool and platform evaluations.
• Act as a tactical responder for significant cyber incidents, supporting containment, eradication and recovery actions.

Skills

Detection engineering

SIEM/XDR/EDR experience

Threat hunting

Automation scripting

Incident response

Threat intelligence

Education

GCDA/GCIA/GCIH certifications

Tools

MITRE ATT&CK

SOAR

Job description

NZ Transport Agency (Waka Kotahi) seeks three Principal Engineers, Detection and Response to enhance the cyber defence capability through advanced threat detection, threat hunting and incident response. You’ll work across SIEM, XDR and EDR platforms to strengthen detection, reduce time to detect threats and protect critical services from cyber risk.

This senior role blends hands-on engineering, technical leadership and tactical response.