Staff Security Platform Engineer

Aurora Innovation Aurora Innovation · Robotics · Mountain View, CA · Security

Staff Security Platform Engineer responsible for the operational health, configuration, and continuous improvement of enterprise security platforms including EDR/XDR, SIEM, IAM, and DLP. This role involves developing detection rules, conducting threat hunting, and performing incident investigations, requiring deep expertise in security tooling rather than software development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the operational health, configuration, and continuous improvement of Aurora's enterprise security platform stack — including EDR/XDR, MDM, SIEM, DLP, IAM/IGA, DNS security, Email security, and PKI — ensuring each tool is tuned, policy-complete, and delivering reliable signal.
  2. Develop and refine detection rules, correlation logic, and alert policies, reducing noise while ensuring Aurora maintains high-fidelity coverage against real threats.
  3. Conduct proactive threat hunting across Aurora's security telemetry — forming hypotheses, querying logs, and investigating anomalies before they surface as incidents.
  4. Serve as the deepest internal expert on Aurora's enterprise security tooling, acting as the escalation point for complex platform issues, misconfigurations, and detection failures.
  5. Participate in the team's on-call rotation, leading deep-dive investigations into security alerts and incidents and driving triage, containment, and root cause analysis.

Skills

Required

  • 12+ years of hands-on experience in enterprise security operations, security platform administration, or a senior SOC engineering role
  • Expert-level proficiency administering and operating at least two enterprise security platforms (e.g., CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Splunk, Panther, Sentinel, Jamf, Kandji/Iru, Puppet, WorkspaceONE, Intune, Zscaler, Okta, Proofpoint, Wiz, osquery)
  • Strong log analysis and threat hunting skills
  • Experience conducting thorough incident investigations — triage, containment, root cause analysis, and post-incident review
  • Ability to assess security control effectiveness

Nice to have

  • Scripting ability for automation, log parsing, or workflow improvement (Python, Bash, or similar)
  • Deep familiarity with MITRE ATT&CK as an operational tool for detection gap analysis and threat hunting hypothesis development.
  • Experience with AWS security telemetry (CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub) and integrating cloud signals into a corporate SIEM.
  • Familiarity with Zero Trust and identity-centric security models as they apply to policy enforcement in IAM and endpoint platforms.
  • Platform-specific certifications such as CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator, Splunk Core Certified Power User, or equivalent — or practitioner certifications like GCIH, GCIA, GCFE, or GCFA.

What the JD emphasized

  • deeply configured, continuously tuned, and fully leveraged
  • deep operational ownership of security tooling rather than software development
  • career built on deep operational ownership of security tooling rather than software development
  • tuning and optimize security platforms beyond out-of-the-box configurations
  • not just deployed and forgotten
  • is it configured correctly, covering the right scope, and generating actionable signal