Staff Security Engineer - Detection and Response

About the role

In this position, you will be a vital member of the Detection and Response Team (DART) at Ridgeline, contributing your knowledge and innovative ideas to enhance our detection and response strategies. You will play a key role in architecting systems that protect our critical infrastructure within AWS and beyond, while also focusing on improving our detection capabilities and managing responses to significant security incidents.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define and shape the DART roadmap by aligning it with business needs and threat models, ensuring detection requirements are identified early in the development of new features and infrastructure.
• Address detection gaps through variant analysis to mitigate entire classes of vulnerabilities rather than just individual issues.
• Design AI-driven detection and triage pipelines that enhance accuracy and reduce manual intervention, ensuring that alerts are meaningful and warrant responses.
• Collaborate as a primary architect for our SIEM, SOAR, and related security platforms, creating scalable and resilient frameworks for data ingestion, enrichment, and alerting.
• Oversee the technical architecture and advancement of our incident response program, guiding the response to complex incidents and collaborating with leadership during critical events.
• Set the technical direction for DART's codebases and infrastructure, making informed architectural decisions that balance speed, accuracy, and maintainability.
• Develop team standards for the responsible use of AI in detection and response processes, including necessary human oversight.
• Influence security strategies across engineering teams by building consensus based on technical credibility rather than unilateral decisions.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, enhancing the team's technical skills through code reviews, collaborative problem-solving, and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• A minimum of 8 years of experience in detection, security operations, incident response, or software engineering, with a proven history of leading cross-functional technical projects.
• High proficiency in Python or another high-level programming language such as Kotlin or TypeScript.
• Experience in engineering AI/LLM-driven systems, including the ability to create augmented detection, triage, and investigation workflows and rigorously validate their outputs.
• Expertise in authoring detections aligned with attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), such as those outlined in MITRE ATT&CK.
• Significant experience in building and maintaining detection-as-code and alerting pipelines, focusing on signal quality and noise reduction.
• Strong familiarity with the AWS ecosystem, particularly in logging and telemetry (CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, GuardDuty, CloudWatch), investigative tools (Athena, IAM analysis), and compute services (Lambda, ECS/EKS).
• Proficient in infrastructure-as-code practices (e.g., Terraform) and CI/CD methodologies.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of clearly articulating detection and response strategies to engineers, product partners, and stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience leading complex, high-impact incidents in a technical lead or incident commander role.
• Practical experience in designing AI agents or LLM-based automation within a security operations context.
• Contributions to open-source detection/security tools or published security research.

Compensation and Benefits

The expected starting salary for this position ranges from $205,000 to $256,000. Final compensation will be determined based on various factors, including the candidate's experience and expertise, and may differ from the stated range.

At Ridgeline, employees have numerous opportunities for career advancement and can significantly impact our products. In addition to a competitive base salary, employees can participate in our Company Stock Plan, subject to the applicable Stock Option Agreement. We offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes unlimited vacation, educational and wellness reimbursements, and no-cost employee insurance plans. For more details on our benefits, please visit our Careers page.

Ridgeline is committed to being a community-focused, discrimination-free equal opportunity employer.

Ridgeline processes the information you submit in connection with your application in accordance with our Applicant Privacy Statement.

About the company

Long narrow elevated forms define our work, with steep sides falling from a narrow crest. Height above surroundings ranges minimally to great spans. Origins vary, formed by deposit, erosion, or tectonics, using bedrock, sediment, lava, or ice. Ridges stand alone or link within larger systems. Smaller elements often branch from these features. Understanding these variables guides our approach. Site conditions, structure, and material shape each project. Clients gain precise mapping and clear analysis. Current needs drive solutions that respect natural layout and scale, supporting decisions with clear, factual terrain interpretation.