Head of Detection and Response

Security | Sydney, Australia | Remote, Remote | San Francisco, United States | Mountain View, United States or Remote | Seattle, United States



The Head of Detection & Response (DnR) is a senior security engineering leader accountable for Atlassian's global incident detection, response, threat intelligence, and security operations programs. This role drives strategy, execution, and measurable outcomes across cloud-first environments, enabling Atlassian to prevent, detect, and respond to threats at scale while building customer trust.

Working at Atlassian

Atlassians can choose where they work whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two. That way, Atlassians have more control over supporting their family, personal goals, and other priorities. We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity.

Strategy and Leadership

• Own the global detection and response strategy, roadmap, and investment plan, tying security outcomes to business risk and customer trust metrics.
• Lead a multi-layer organization across time zones; build a high-performing leadership bench and succession plan.
• Establish governance with clear OKRs, SLOs, and outcome dashboards for executive and board-level visibility.

• Scale cloud-native detections across identity, data, endpoints, CI/CD, containers, and SaaS leveraging telemetry and modern rule engines.
• Continuously reduce false positives and missed detections through quality gates, purple teaming, and regression testing pipelines.

• Operate a world-class IR function with 24x7 coverage, incident management, executive comms, and customer/regulatory readiness.
• Drive automation and playbooks for rapid containment, eradication, and recovery; blameless post-incident reviews with durable fixes.

• Build an intel fusion capability that translates external and internal signals into prioritized detections and preemptive controls.
• Run hypothesis-driven threat hunting focused on Atlassian-specific TTPs, with measurable findings-to-detection conversion.

• Partner with Trust Engineering to evolve the security data platform; ensure reliable, privacy-aware telemetry and lineage for detections and analytics.
• Leverage ML/LLM-assisted detections, triage, and summarization responsibly; define evaluation frameworks and human-in-the-loop controls.

• Align with Product Security, Corporate Security, Governance/Risk, and Security Assessments to close systemic risks and meet customer/regulatory commitments.
• Represent DnR in executive forums, customer escalations, and external audits; build trust through transparency and evidence.