Senior Security Operations / Detection Engineer

About the Role

You’ll own what we can see and how we respond: log pipelines, detections, runbooks, alert handling, and incident coordination.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role reporting to our security lead. You’ll work directly with engineering to build and operate a detection and response function suited to a small company. San Francisco is preferred.

You’ll own your roadmap, build and run the tooling yourself, and lead incidents with incomplete information. Strong written communication is essential: you’ll coordinate independently with engineers, customers, and vendors across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain security log pipelines and document coverage gaps.
• Build, validate, and tune detections across cloud infrastructure, CI systems, identity providers, and internal services.
• Manage detections as code, with clear documentation and ongoing maintenance.
• Write and maintain a runbook for every alert.
• Define severity-based alert response SLAs and own performance against them.
• Lead incidents from investigation and containment through recovery and follow-up.
• Produce clear incident timelines, reports, and recommendations.
• Measure and improve time to detect and contain threats.
• Automate detection of unexpected identity and access changes and drive remediation.
• Prioritize improvements based on risk and the needs of a small engineering organization.

What We’re Looking for

• 5+ years of relevant experience.
• Experience building a detection and response function from scratch.
• Hands-on experience building and tuning SIEM detections, preferably in Splunk, and managing them as code.
• Experience building log pipelines from cloud and CI systems.
• Strong familiarity with GitHub, Okta, and cloud audit logs, including their limitations.
• Experience leading incidents end-to-end and making containment decisions on partial information.
• Understanding of OAuth, personal access tokens, OIDC, and how attackers abuse authentication systems.
• Ability to write Python scripts to investigate incidents and automate security operations.
• Strong independent judgment and experience owning priorities with limited oversight.
• Clear communication under pressure and a willingness to surface bad news early.
• Availability to overlap with Pacific working hours.

Bonus Points

• You helped build a detection and response function at a growing technology company.
• Experience in managed detection and response or incident response across multiple customer environments.
• Experience partnering closely with engineers in a small, fast-moving team.