Staff Security Engineer — Detection & Response (AI-Enabled)

Pinterest, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 177,000 - 365,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking an experienced Security Engineer to build and improve our detection and response capabilities in a cloud-first environment. You will have the opportunity to solve challenging problems and protect our employees and infrastructure.

You will lead the Detection & Response Team, define strategy, build alerts, and collaborate with cross‑functional partners across security and engineering. Expect remote-first with occasional in‑office collaboration.

Qualifications

• Broad and deep knowledge of intrusion detection and incident response, with an engineering focus in a modern, cloud-first environment.
• Knowledge of the attacker lifecycle, common attack techniques, and detection methods.
• Hands-on experience writing SIEM queries for alerting, response, and threat hunting.
• Experience consuming threat intelligence and applying it to improve detection capabilities.
• Familiarity with telemetry sources including EDR, Osquery, and firewall logs.
• Understanding of networking technologies and/or network security, including basic TCP/IP fundamentals.
• Depth in macOS internals, or Linux/UNIX or Windows internals, including persistence mechanisms and privilege escalation techniques.
• Scripting or automation experience (e.g., Python, Go, Ruby) for tool development or integration.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve speed and quality in your day‑to‑day workflow for relevant outputs.
• Strong track record of critical evaluation and verification of AI‑assisted work (e.g., testing, source‑checking, data validation, peer review).
• High integrity and ownership: you protect sensitive data, avoid over‑reliance on AI, and remain accountable for final decisions and deliverables.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, a related field, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Act as senior technical resource for the Detection & Response Team
• Identify capability gaps and help define the strategy and roadmap for the team
• Imagine new ways to improve our detection engineering program and lead efforts to build new capabilities
• Build alerts and automation workflows to improve our ability to detect and respond to external and internal security threats
• Manage logging pipelines and supporting infrastructure, and onboard new logging sources to improve detection coverage
• Develop and maintain internal tooling to expand and automate the team’s detection and response capabilities
• Respond to alerts generated by our tooling and lead incidents as part of an on-call rotation
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners across security and engineering
• Hunt for previously undetected threats in our environment
• Leverage AI to streamline and enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and coverage of security engineering

Skills

Incident response

Threat hunting

Threat intelligence

Scripting (Python/Go/Ruby)

AI usage in daily work

Critical evaluation of AI outputs

Networking fundamentals

MacOS/Linux/Windows internals

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

EDR

Osquery

Firewall logs

Job description

Pinterest is seeking an experienced Security Engineer to build and improve our detection and response capabilities in a cloud-first environment. You will have the opportunity to solve challenging problems and protect our employees and infrastructure.

You will lead the Detection & Response Team, define strategy, build alerts, and collaborate with cross‑functional partners across security and engineering. Expect remote-first with occasional in‑office collaboration.