Director, Detection & Threat Response

At Allstate, great things happen when our people work together to protect families and their belongings from life’s uncertainties. And for more than 90 years, our innovative drive has kept us a step ahead of our customers’ evolving needs. From advocating for seat belts, air bags and graduated driving laws, to being an industry leader in pricing sophistication, telematics, and, more recently, device and identity protection. 

Job Description

The Director, Detection & Threat Response is the enterprise’s senior leader for intelligence-led detection and response. The role is accountable for how Allstate anticipates, finds, and stops adversaries before they affect customers, data, or operations. This leader sets the strategic direction for three global functions: D&R Engineering & Automation, Threat Intelligence, and Threat Hunting. The goal is to unite them into one system in which intelligence sets priorities, hunting tests those priorities against the environment, detections are engineered and shipped as code, and response runs at machine speed under clear governance.

As a Director, you won’t just deliver results – you drive our culture and shared purpose. You can work remotely and will commute to a nearby office and/or travel for meaningful connection opportunities.

Imagine this.

• 7:02 a.m. A new intelligence report describes an MFA-bypass technique being used against financial services firms. Within two minutes it is scored against Allstate’s priority intelligence requirements and flagged as relevant, and an automated hunt launches across identity and email telemetry.

• 7:09 a.m. The hunt gets a hit: one account shows the technique’s pattern. An AI agent opens the investigation immediately, pulls identity and device context, runs the pivots a senior analyst would run, and reaches a high-confidence verdict with a full evidence trail.

• 7:11 a.m. Contained. The verdict meets the bar for a pre-approved, reversible response, so the system acts on its own: active sessions revoked, credentials reset, account temporarily locked. Nine minutes from first intelligence to containment.

• 7:16 a.m. An analyst reviews the evidence and the actions taken, confirms the call, and reaches out to the employee. Humans stay accountable for every automated action, without being the bottleneck for it.

• 8:02 a.m. An AI-drafted detection for the technique is waiting in an engineer’s review queue. It uses the real attack telemetry from the hunt as its test case, and has been backtested against 30 days of history for false positives. It arrives linked to the intelligence that prompted it, the attack path it closes, and its expected alert volume. The engineer approves it and the pipeline promotes it. Next time, nobody has to go hunting. It fires on its own.
  

Now imagine you lead the teams that made that possible. Your intelligence team set the priority. Your hunters tested it against our environment. Your engineers built the automation that contained it in minutes and the pipeline that turned it into durable coverage within the hour. And you know it worked because you inspected the data, not because someone said so.

That’s the job, and it’s what we’re building at Allstate.

What we’re building

Allstate is building a Cyber Response organization designed for the speed of AI-enabled threats. The work underway is the kind most security teams are still only talking about:

• An AI-assisted detection-as-code pipeline. Every detection version-controlled, peer-reviewed, tested, tied to the attack paths that matter most to Allstate, and promoted through CI/CD, with AI agents accelerating how detections are created and validated.

• Agentic investigation and governed response. AI-driven triage and investigation paired with orchestrated response, with human decision gates where the business impact is real.

• Automated threat intelligence. Pipelines that turn global threat reporting into fast, relevant action for exposure management, incident response, hunting, and leadership.

• Intelligence-led threat hunting. Hypothesis-driven hunts, AI-assisted scoping, and findings that flow straight into durable detections.

• Continuous adversarial validation. Breach-and-attack simulation and purple teaming that prove coverage against real attacker behavior.

We need a leader who can bring these together into one system and take it to enterprise scale.

Why this matters

Allstate exists to protect people from life’s uncertainties. In security, that promise now runs into a math problem: adversaries are using automation and AI to scale, and human hours do not. If analyst capacity decides what we detect, risk ends up in the alerts no one had time to look at. Our goal is to predict, detect, and disrupt threats before they reach our customers and our data, with coverage we can prove, detections we can trust, response at machine speed, and automation we can govern.

What Allstate can do for you

• A charter, not a backlog. You’ll lead three teams, D&R Engineering & Automation, Threat Intelligence, and Threat Hunting, and define how they work as one system. You report to the leader of Cyber Defense & Response and sit on that leadership team.

• Scale and stakes. A Fortune 100 insurer, a global team across the US, Ireland, and India operating follow-the-sun, and an enterprise attack surface spanning identity, cloud, email, endpoint, and applications.

• Real backing for the AI-era SOC. Executive sponsorship and active investment in agentic investigation, orchestration, and AI-assisted engineering, with a mandate to scale through intelligence and automation.

• Room to build the culture. A mandate to build teams where candor is normal, “I don’t know” is a respected answer, quality is inspected rather than assumed, and people improve the system instead of heroically working around it.
  

What you can do for Allstate

• Build one loop, not three teams. Create the strategy and operating processes that connect intelligence, hunting, and D&R engineering. Priority intelligence requirements set the agenda, hunts test the hypotheses, and every finding ends in a detection, a control change, a telemetry requirement, or a documented decision.

• Decouple coverage from analyst capacity. With AI handling first-pass investigation, stop tuning coverage to what humans can staff. Expand behavioral coverage across the attack paths that matter most to Allstate, with identity first in line, and measure coverage of those paths rather than rule counts.

• Run detections like code, end to end. Git-backed content, unit tests, linting, peer review, staged CI/CD promotion, and a clear definition of done, applied to every detection in the library.

• Make the queue work for the SOC. Partner with Security Operations so detections land in AI-assisted investigation at creation time. Look past medians to tail wait time and cycle time across every severity, because the risk sits in the tail, not the average.

• Put humans where judgment changes the outcome. Let machines investigate and take pre-approved, reversible containment actions at machine speed, with every action reviewed by a human. Keep a human decision gate for business-impacting remediation. Earn trust in AI the statistical way, with parallel runs and measured agreement, and expand its autonomy as the data proves it out.

• Inspect quality, then build it in. Stand up quality control across detections, hunts, and intelligence products: defined rubrics, meaningful sampling, and a feedback loop where every defect becomes training, automation, or a process fix.

• Scale intelligence for speed and relevance. Lead automated intelligence pipelines that tell exposure management, incident response, hunting, and leadership, in minutes, when a threat actually matters to Allstate.

• Show your work. Build capacity models, coverage baselines, and a quarterly scorecard that ties detection and response to outcomes and cost lines leaders already track. Ask the right questions and answer them with data.

• Lead leaders and grow people. Develop the leaders of all three teams, hire for traits like curiosity, empathy, and candor, and teach the skills. Protect the team from burnout by fixing the system that causes it.
  

What you should bring with you

• 12+ years across threat detection, incident response, threat intelligence, or security operations, in large enterprise, managed detection and response, incident response consulting, or security product teams.

• Experience leading leaders, including teams distributed across time zones.

• A track record of applying software engineering discipline to detection: you have run detections as code and know what it takes to keep a library healthy.

• Experience taking AI or agentic capabilities in detection and response from pilot into production, and clear opinions about where humans must stay in the loop.

• A data-driven management style: capacity modeling, queueing, quality control, and the habit of answering hard questions with data.

• Deep understanding of attack surfaces and attacker behavior, especially identity, cloud, and email, and how to turn that into measurable coverage of the attack paths that matter rather than a color-coded matrix.

• The ability to explain the math to a CFO and the TTP to an engineer, in the same afternoon.

• Empathy and candor. You own the problem before you solve it, and you build teams where people can say “I was wrong.”

Skills

Cyber Defense, Cyber Threat Intelligence, Incident Response, People Leadership, Production Automation

Compensation

Compensation offered for this role is 187,500.00 - 258,375.00 annually and is based on experience and qualifications.

The candidate(s) offered this position will be required to submit to a background investigation.

Joining our team isn’t just a job — it’s an opportunity. One that takes your skills and pushes them to the next level. One that encourages you to challenge the status quo. One where you can shape the future of protection while supporting causes that mean the most to you. Joining our team means being part of something bigger – a winning team making a meaningful impact.

Allstate generally does not sponsor individuals for employment-based visas for this position.

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Allstate provides a comprehensive technology setup, including a laptop, monitors, headset, keyboard, and mouse. Employees eligible to work from home also receive a monthly connectivity reimbursement to help offset internet costs.

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