Confluent - Staff Security Engineer I - Detection & Response

IBM; Armonk (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Confluent, a leader in real-time data streaming, seeks an experienced security engineer to join the infrastructure security team in detection and response. You will architect scalable security tooling and mentor other engineers as we protect cloud-native environments.

You will implement threat-hunting roadmaps, translate attack models into high-signal detections, and collaborate with engineering and compliance to ensure visibility and secure-by-default infrastructure across multi-cloud

Qualifications

• 8+ years in detection and response or security engineering in cloud-first environments.
• Deep expertise in detection engineering and incident response.
• Experience instrumenting telemetry and building detections in Kubernetes, containers, and multi-cloud.
• Proficient in Python or Golang for tooling, automation, and pipelines.
• Proven incident response and containment in cloud-first environments.
• Experience with open-source or commercial logging/SEIM/SOAR solutions.
• Ability to work with remote teams and drive engineering decisions with data.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build and maintain scalable cloud-based security monitoring solutions across logging pipelines, ETL and SIEM ingestion.
• Drive the long-term threat hunting roadmap and translate adversary tradecraft into detections.
• Build processes to triage security alerts and drive incidents to closure, including on-call rotation.
• Research new threat vectors to keep the program aligned with current threats.
• Improve detection rules by tracking metrics like coverage and precision with engineering teams.
• Collaborate with engineering to build logging pipelines and secure-by-default visibility for new infra.
• Contribute to strategy, risk management, and prioritization for detection and response efforts.
• Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and leadership to other engineers.

Skills

Security engineering

Threat detection

Incident response

Mentorship

Cloud security

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

Kubernetes

Containers

Multi-cloud

Python

Golang

SIEM

SOAR

Job description

Introduction

At Confluent, we’re creating a category that transforms how every company manages and streams data. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s Confluent in action—giving our customers instant access to massive amounts of real-time data, enabling them to thrive in an ever-changing digital world. As one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies in history, and with Fortune 100 customers across major industries, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. We also have experience on our side. Our leaders have taken companies of our size to major success before and include some of the original creators of Apache Kafka®.

Introduction

At Confluent, we’re creating a category that transforms how every company manages and streams data. Have you ever found a new favorite series on Netflix, picked up groceries curbside at Walmart, or paid for something using Square? That’s Confluent in action—giving our customers instant access to massive amounts of real-time data, enabling them to thrive in an ever-changing digital world. As one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies in history, and with Fortune 100 customers across major industries, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us. We also have experience on our side. Our leaders have taken companies of our size to major success before and include some of the original creators of Apache Kafka®.

Your Role And Responsibilities

We are looking for an experienced security engineer to join our infrastructure security engineering team with a focus on Detection and Response. You will have a unique opportunity to leverage your threat detection and response experience and build some of the foundational systems and services to keep our infrastructure free from malicious actors and threats. As an expert in your domain, you will be identifying high-leverage problems and driving open-ended projects. You will partner closely with engineering teams and compliance analysts to ensure that we maintain sufficient visibility into our environments and develop effective programs and practices to ensure that our environments are always secure. Tooling and automation will be key to success as we scale our environments to meet customer demand. In addition to being a highly productive engineer, you will serve as a technical compass and mentor the next generation of security engineers. We intend to be the world's best, fastest, and most complete stream processing service built by an excellent team, all while having fun - come join us on the journey!

What You Will Do

• Architect, build and maintain scalable cloud-based security monitoring solutions, across logging pipelines, ETL jobs, and SIEM ingestion.
• Drive the long-term roadmap for threat hunting by translating modern adversary tradecraft (TTPs) and threat models into high-signal detection strategies to ensure our critical infrastructure operates safely.
• Build processes and workflows to triage security alerts and drive incidents to closure, including participating in a shared on-call rotation for incident response.
• Research new threat attack vectors and ensure that our detection and response program is in line with the current threat landscape.
• Proactively improve the quality of our detection rules by defining and tracking key metrics (e.g., coverage, precision, MTTD), working directly with engineering teams to eliminate classes of issues.
• Collaborate with engineering teams in building logging pipelines needed to gather relevant security telemetry, ensuring new infrastructure ships with secure-by-default visibility.
• Contribute to strategy, risk management and prioritization for all efforts around detection and response.
• Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and leadership to other engineers, raising the bar for security operations across the organization.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience in detection and response or similar security engineering role in a cloud-first environment.
• Deep, expert-level domain knowledge in detection engineering and security incident response.
• Experience in instrumenting telemetry and building high-quality detections in large-scale, heterogeneous deployments (e.g., Kubernetes, containers, multi-cloud).
• Proficient ability in writing code using Python or Golang to design complex tooling, automation, and data pipelines.
• Demonstrated experience with effective incident response and containment practices, preferably in a cloud-first environment.
• Experience with operating open-source and/or commercial solutions for logging and security event management (e.g. SIEM, log aggregation, SOAR, etc).
• Ability to work alongside a remote team, using a data-driven mindset to propose and own engineering decisions, and the capability to drive consensus across ambiguous, organizational-wide challenges.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Familiarity with more than one cloud vendor (AWS, GCP, Azure) is a plus.