Detection and Response Engineer
- Salary
- $150K - $270K
- Level
- Mid
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 17 August 2026.
About the role
Modal's standard text
About Us:
AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal.
Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now.
Our customers include category-defining companies like Ramp, Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale.
We've passed $1B in annualized run rate, up 15x from a year ago. In October 2026 we raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B valuation.
Modal's standard text
Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g.,Seaborn,Luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience.
The Role:
We're looking for a Detection & Response Engineer to build the systems that help us identify, investigate, and respond to threats across our platform.
This is an engineering role focused on automation. You'll build detections, investigation tooling, and response capabilities that scale with our infrastructure, using AI where it meaningfully improves signal, investigation speed, and operational effectiveness.
You'll work closely with infrastructure, platform, and security engineers to ensure every incident makes the platform more resilient.
What You'll Work On:
Detection Engineering
- Design and build high-fidelity detections for attacks, abuse, and anomalous behavior across our infrastructure and production systems
- Continuously improve detections based on telemetry, threat intelligence, and lessons learned from incidents
- Improve visibility across cloud infrastructure, containers, identity systems, and production services
Incident Response
- Lead or participate in investigations spanning production infrastructure, cloud environments, and internal systems
- Build playbooks and automation that reduce investigation time and improve response consistency
- Drive post-incident improvements that eliminate entire classes of future incidents
Security Tooling & Automation
- Build internal tooling that improves detection, investigation, and response workflows
- Leverage LLMs to automate repetitive analysis, accelerate investigations, and surface actionable insights from security telemetry
- Improve the collection, quality, and usability of security telemetry across the platform
Engineering Partnership
- Partner with engineering teams to ensure new systems are observable and secure by default
- Help teams instrument services with the telemetry needed for effective detection and response
- Drive security improvements that make the platform easier to defend over time
What We're Looking For:
- Experience in detection engineering, incident response, security engineering, or software engineering with a strong security focus
- Strong software engineering skills with experience building production systems
- Experience investigating security incidents in cloud-native or distributed environments
- Familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Linux, and networking
- Experience building detections using logs, telemetry, behavioral signals, or large-scale event data
- Strong SQL skills for investigating security events and developing detections
- Interest in applying AI and LLMs to detection, investigation, and response, including understanding emerging threats involving AI-powered systems
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience building AI- or LLM-powered security tooling
- Experience with SIEM, SOAR, or EDR platforms
- Experience with Kubernetes security or large-scale cloud infrastructure
- Experience with threat hunting, malware analysis, or digital forensics
- Experience contributing to security operations in a high-growth engineering organization
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
Kubernetes · SIEM · SQL
Rare in Modal's other 28 open postings.
In most of Modal's ads
Seaborn
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
76% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Modal's standard text, folded away below.
Read against Modal's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 24 open in Engineering. 7 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in October: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Seaborn (24 of 24), Linux (11 of 24), Linux Kernel (10 of 24), Serverless (8 of 24), LLM (7 of 24), Rust (7 of 24), Golang (4 of 24)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- IT Lead posted Oct 15
- Member of Technical Staff - Storage (Stockholm) posted Oct 14
- Member of Technical Staff - SDK (Stockholm) posted Oct 7
- Member of Technical Staff - Inference Runtime posted Oct 5
- Member of Technical Staff - Machines posted Sep 22
- Member of Technical Staff - Storage posted Sep 22
- Documentation Engineer posted Sep 21
- Inference Engineering and Product Lead posted Sep 16
- ML Research Intern posted Jul 28
- Member of Technical Staff - Research, Post-Training posted Jul 5
- Member of Technical Staff - Research, Inference posted Jul 5
- Systems Engineering Manager posted May 19
- Member of Technical Staff - Product (Growth) posted May 18
- Infrastructure Security Engineer posted Apr 21
- Member of Technical Staff - ML Performance posted Apr 21
- Forward Deployed Engineer - ML posted Feb 23
- Systems Engineering Manager posted Feb 3
- Member of Technical Staff - Platform Engineering posted Jan 19
- Member of Technical Staff - Systems posted Jan 12
- Member of Technical Staff - Product (Backend) posted Jan 9
- Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems posted Sep 23
- Member of Technical Staff - SDK posted Aug 22
- Member of Technical Staff - Systems posted Oct 23
From the team and dates on Modal's own job board.
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