Security Operations Engineer

Your Role:

We are seeking a Security Operations Engineer to own the daily operation and continuous improvement of Alpaca’s SIEM and SOAR capabilities. You will onboard security logs, develop and tune detections, keep alerts actionable, maintain operational dashboards, and automate repeatable response actions.

You will be hands-on and operationally minded. You will keep log onboarding, detection quality, and alert handling consistent, and you will turn security signals into action as the business grows.

This role reports to the Enterprise Security Architect and works closely with Security, IT, DevOps, and Engineering.

The Security Team is 100% distributed and remote.

Things You Get To Do:

The core responsibilities of the Security Operations Engineer are focused on detection, response automation, operational excellence, and cross-functional coordination.

SIEM Operations and Detection Engineering:

• Log Onboarding: Onboard new security log sources across cloud, identity, endpoint, SaaS, and application systems, including parsing, normalization, and data quality checks.
• Detection Development: Build, test, and tune detection rules based on threat intelligence, incident learnings, and emerging attack techniques, mapped to frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
• Alert Quality: Tune, enrich, and manage the lifecycle of detections so alerts stay actionable.
• Detection Coverage: Maintain detections for critical systems and priority attack techniques.
• Operational Dashboards: Build and maintain dashboards for alert volume, ingest health, and response status.

Incident Response & Metrics:

• Incident Support: Support security incidents with evidence collection, detection queries, and containment actions, working with IT, Engineering, and external partners.
• Runbooks: Develop and improve alert-handling and incident response runbooks and escalation paths.
• Operational Metrics: Track and report security operations metrics, including mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).
• On-Call: Participate in the Security Operations on-call rotation after onboarding and cross-training.

SOAR and Response Automation:

• Playbooks: Design, build, and maintain SOAR playbooks that automate repeatable response actions, including enrichment, containment, ticketing, and notification.
• Triage and Investigation: Triage, investigate, and respond to security alerts across endpoints, identity, cloud, network, and application logs.
• Threat Hunting: Run hypothesis-driven hunts based on threat intelligence and incident learnings, and turn findings into new detections.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

• Excited about Alpaca’s mission and what we’re building
• 3+ years of experience in Security Operations or detection engineering roles
• Hands-on experience operating and tuning a SIEM
• Experience building SOAR playbooks or equivalent response automation
• Working with Linux
• Scripting or automation experience (Python, Bash) for security operations tasks
• Experience onboarding and parsing log sources from cloud, identity, and SaaS platforms
• Strong alert investigation skills across identity, endpoint, network, and cloud environments
• Understanding of common attacker techniques and detection methodologies
• Experience supporting security incidents, including evidence collection, detection queries, and containment
• Willing to participate in an on-call rotation
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially during incidents
• Comfortable working cross-functionally and handling escalations calmly and decisively

 Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):  

• Experience securing financial, trading, or other highly regulated platforms
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001
• Experience with detection-as-code, GitOps, and CI/CD pipelines
• Knowledge of cloud security logging (AWS/GCP/Azure) and SaaS security telemetry
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-hosted security tooling
• Experience working with a managed SOC or MSSP
• Security certifications (GCIA, GCIH, GCED, or similar)
• Ability to balance security rigor with operational efficiency and business needs