Engineering Manager, Investigations and Incident Response

Airbnb Airbnb · Consumer · United States · Software Engineering

Engineering Manager for Airbnb's Threat Detection and Response team, focusing on automating security detection, incident response, and building capabilities for the incident lifecycle. The role involves leading a team, defining strategy, and scaling the function through automation and engineering.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and execute new approaches to detecting, containing, and mitigating security threats and incidents, while driving the next stage of maturity for our investigations and response capabilities.
  2. Own incident response and investigation outcomes, leading end-to-end response across identification, containment, eradication, and recovery.
  3. Shape how the team operates—evolving operating models, guiding execution during incidents, and scaling through thoughtful use of automation and engineering.
  4. Define and drive the strategy for a modern incident response function, ensuring high-quality investigations and that every incident leads to meaningful improvements in our detection and response capabilities.
  5. Assess current capabilities and chart the path forward across people, process, and technology, evolving the operating model to support effective global response.

Skills

Required

  • 9+ years of industry experience in threat detection and incident response
  • 3-5 years in engineering management
  • Experience shaping or evolving incident response programs in complex environments
  • Exceptional people management and mentorship skills
  • recruiting, developing and retaining top talent
  • Strong understanding of attacker behavior and frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK
  • Experience and understanding of technologies such as EDR, SIEM, cloud environments, and investigation workflows
  • Experience in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Ability to analyze ambiguous situations and make sound, timely decisions
  • Comfort partnering with engineering teams to build scalable solutions
  • Ability to operate at both strategic and tactical levels
  • Experience defining team strategy, priorities, and operating models
  • Strong judgment in risk assessment, escalation, and trade-offs
  • Excellent communication skills across technical and executive audiences

What the JD emphasized

  • mature Threat Detection & Response organization
  • next stage of maturity
  • modern incident response function
  • evolve the operating model
  • scale the function through automation, tooling, and improved workflows
  • senior escalation point during high-severity or complex incidents
  • strong root cause analysis
  • Improve escalation paths, ownership clarity, and cross-functional coordination
  • incident learnings into durable security improvements
  • 9+ years of industry experience
  • minimum of 3-5 years in engineering management
  • shaping or evolving incident response programs in complex environments
  • recruiting, developing and retaining top talent
  • Comfort partnering with engineering teams to build scalable solutions
  • operate at both strategic and tactical levels
  • defining team strategy, priorities, and operating models