Senior Security Engineer, Defensive Infrastructure

dLocal · Madrid / Barcelona / Sao Paulo / Montevideo / Buenos Aires / Bucharest

Why should you join dLocal?
 
dLocal enables the biggest companies in the world to collect payments in 40 countries in emerging markets. Global brands rely on us to increase conversion rates and simplify payment expansion effortlessly. As both a payments processor and a merchant of record where we operate, we make it possible for our merchants to make inroads into the world’s fastest-growing, emerging markets. 
 
By joining us you will be a part of an amazing global team that makes it all happen. Being a part of dLocal means working with 1000+ teammates from 30+ different nationalities and developing an international career that impacts millions of people’s daily lives. We are builders, we never run from a challenge, we are customer-centric, and if this sounds like you, we know you will thrive in our team.
 
 
 

About Us & The Role

dLocal processes billions in payments across 40 emerging markets. The infrastructure behind that runs fast, runs globally, and runs on engineering teams that do not have patience for security that slows things down. Neither do we.

Our security function is lean by design and automation-native by philosophy. We have built a modern stack, a senior team, and a culture where security engineers are expected to think like builders, not gatekeepers. The CISO's mandate is simple: safely accelerate the business. Everything we build is oriented around that.

This role is the technical backbone of our defensive infrastructure layer. You will own the detection, defensive security platforms and cloud security engineering that every other security team depends on. You will work across a wide ecosystem: Cyber Detection & Response, Cloud & Platform Security, Application Security, Offensive Security, IAM, and our Security Automation & AI team internally, and Cloud Platforms, SRE, DevOps, Network, and CI/CD teams on the engineering side.

That cross-functional surface area is intentional. This is not a role where you sit inside a tool and tune rules. You will be the person who connects posture signals to response workflows, translates every security requirement into engineering backlogs and builds the infrastructure that makes the rest of the security organization measurably faster.

If your instinct when you see a manual process is to automate it before the week is out and you get genuinely energized by owning hard infrastructure problems end to end, this is built for you.

We are looking for a versatile senior engineer who can demonstrate high-level proficiency across most of these key security areas:

1. Defensive Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

  • Strategic Architecture: Partner with the CDR team to architect, deploy, and maintain the health of our core defensive stack (SIEM, EDR, DLP, CASB). You ensure the platforms are built to provide the high-fidelity signal they need to defend the business.

  • Log Lifecycle: Identify, onboard, and validate log sources across production and enterprise. You own the full log lifecycle: from ingestion and observability pipelines to actionable alerting.

  • Policy Tuning: Configure agent policies and manage underlying infrastructure (patching/scaling). You make the final call on security-vs-productivity trade-offs, ensuring the fleet is baseline-secure and performant.

    • 2. Cloud Platform Engineering

  • Hardened Foundations: Partner with the CPS team to design secure-by-default AWS architectures, golden AMIs, and EKS base images that serve as the blueprint for our engineering teams.

  • Security-as-Code: Drive technical guardrails through Terraform modules, admission controllers, and automated drift detection, turning CPS policy requirements into engineering reality.

  • Proactive Design: Lead threat modeling sessions with SRE and Product teams to bake security into the design phase and translate findings into prioritized engineering backlogs.

    • 3. Automation & AI Integration

  • Intelligent Workflows: Collaborate with the internal AI & Automation team to feed platform signals into automated, AI-assisted response pipelines.

  • Orchestration: Design and optimize SOAR workflows to eliminate manual toil. If a process is repeatable, you automate it to ensure the security org scales without adding headcount.

  • Compliance Engineering: Own technical security controls and evidence collection for PCI DSS, SOX, SOC2, etc. Automate technical controls and evidence collection for PCI DSS, SOX, and SOC2, making audits a seamless byproduct of good engineering.

    • 4. Incident Response & Strategic Advisory

  • Advisory: Act as an advisor during complex security events across cloud, production, and enterprise environments.

  • Feedback Loops: Ensure every incident investigated by the CDR team feeds directly back into our detection logic and automation workflows, hardening the environment against future repetitions.

    • What You Bring

  • 6+ years of hands-on experience across Security Operations, Detection Engineering, and Cloud Security, with a strong track record of building and owning infrastructure, not just operating it.

  • Platform depth: SIEM, EDR, DLP, CSPM, CNAPP. You know these tools at the configuration and architecture level, not just the dashboard level.

  • Cloud-native engineering: advanced AWS security architecture (IAM, SCPs, GuardDuty, and beyond), production EKS hardening, and Kubernetes security from first principles.

  • Automation and IaC proficiency: expert-level Terraform and Python (or Go). You build integrations and automate workflows because doing things manually at scale offends you.

  • Adversary-centric detection mindset: MITRE ATT&CK is a working tool for you, not a reference poster. You build detections that find real attacker behavior.

  • Compliance ownership: you have directly owned technical controls and evidence production for PCI DSS, SOX, SOC2 or equivalent. You know how to make compliance not hurt the engineering team.

  • Cross-functional range: you can run a threat modeling session with a product team, hand off a prioritized backlog to DevOps, and interface with OffSec on findings, all without creating friction. Stakeholder intelligence is a real skill you have built.

  • Grit: high autonomy means high accountability. You are comfortable with ambiguity, do the manual work when it needs doing, and do not wait for someone to define the path.


    • Nice to Have

  • Solid knowledge across multiple security domains like CDR, Cloud Security, AppSec, Offsec, etc

  • Experience with Security Platforms, AI agents, LLM APIs and automation frameworks. If you are not there yet, you are actively building it.

  • Familiarity with threat intelligence platforms and integrating intel into detection pipelines.

  • MDR vendor co-management experience.

  • Prior involvement in purple-team or red-team exercises.

  • Certifications (GCIA, GCFA, OSCP, AWS Security Specialty) are valued but secondary to what you have built and shipped.

    • How You'll Work

    High ownership. No queue to wait in.

    You will interface daily across Cyber Detection & Response, Cloud & Platform Security, AppSec, IAM, Offensive Security, and the Security Automation & AI team. On the engineering side, you will work regularly with Cloud Platforms, SRE, DevOps, Network, and CI/CD teams. The surface area is wide and the problems are real.

    The CISO's office operates on one principle: security is a business enabler. You will have executive sponsorship and the political cover to make pragmatic trade-offs. What you will not have is the option to move slowly or hide behind process.

    If you want to own infrastructure that actually matters, work with a team that respects engineering craft, and build in an environment that moves at the speed of the business, this is the right place.

    Apply →