Staff Security Engineer, Security Operations

Position Summary
The Staff Security Engineer, Security Operations is responsible for protecting GoodLeap’s cloud environments, applications, endpoints, and corporate systems through detection engineering, incident response, and security operations. This role builds and tunes detections, leads investigation and response for security incidents, and manages the security tooling that provides visibility across cloud, identity, endpoint, and email. The Staff Security Engineer will design and build AI agents and automation that reduce time-to-detect and time-to-respond, and will establish monitoring of AI activity across the enterprise, including AI tools, agents, and integrations used by employees and engineering teams. This role works closely with software engineers, infrastructure, IT, and compliance partners to ensure security controls are consistently applied and operationally effective.  
Additionally, the Staff Security Engineer develops security requirements, conducts security risk assessments, evaluates security services and technologies, maintains incident response plans and runbooks, and provides mentoring to the security team and partner engineering teams. This role will own endpoint detection and response (CrowdStrike) and email security as these capabilities are brought into the security function.

Essential Job Duties and Responsibilities

Detection Engineering & Monitoring

- Design, build, test, and tune detections across cloud, identity, endpoint, and email telemetry using detection-as-code practices mapped to MITRE ATT&CK.

- Manage security logging, SIEM, and alerting pipelines.

- Establish monitoring of AI activity, including AI tools, agents, MCP integrations, and API keys, to detect data exposure, misuse, and anomalous behavior.

- Reduce time-to-detect through applied threat intelligence and sensor enrichment.

Incident Response

- Lead investigation, containment, eradication, and recovery for security incidents.

- Serve as incident lead for significant events and coordinate with legal, compliance, and leadership on regulatory notification obligations.

- Maintain incident response plans, playbooks, and runbooks.

- Conduct tabletop exercises and post-incident reviews that drive lasting control improvements.

Security Tooling, Automation & AI Agents

- Deploy and manage the security operations toolset, including cloud security monitoring, WAF, DDoS protection, IDS, EDR (CrowdStrike), and email security.

- Build AI agents and automation for alert triage, enrichment, investigation, and response.

- Review results from vulnerability scans, penetration testing, and other sources for true positives and propose remediation or mitigating controls.

- Serve as a subject matter expert (SME) on AWS cloud security and consult on the secure design of cloud-based systems.

Mentorship & Leadership

- Provide mentorship and guidance to the security team and partner engineering teams on detection, response, and security operations practices.

- Share in-depth understanding of company and industry methodologies, policies, standards, and controls.

- Help build the security team and lead efforts to mature GoodLeap’s security operations capability.

Required Skills, Knowledge and Abilities

- In-depth knowledge of Amazon AWS, including security configuration, logging, and tooling (e.g., CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub).

- Hands-on experience in detection engineering, including SIEM query languages and detection-as-code.

- Hands-on experience in incident response, including log analysis and host and cloud investigation.

- Familiar with the MITRE ATT&CK framework and OWASP Top 10.

- Knowledge of network and web related protocols (e.g., TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, TLS).

- Experience with, or ability to quickly ramp on, EDR platforms (CrowdStrike Falcon preferred).

- Experience with, or ability to quickly ramp on, email security (phishing, BEC, DMARC/SPF/DKIM).

- Experience building automation in Python or a similar language.

- Experience building or integrating LLM-based agents and workflows.

- Understanding of AI-specific risks such as prompt injection, data leakage, and excessive agent permissions.

- Experience working in a SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or ISO control environment.

- Proven ability to combine business acumen, technical acumen, and process expertise to assess requirements and alignment.

- Strong communicator across verbal, written, ticketing, and messaging channels.

- Able to prioritize and deliver on multiple tasks independently with a strong bias toward action in a fast-paced environment.

- GCIH, GCFA, GCDA, CCSP, CISSP, CrowdStrike, or comparable certifications are a plus.

Additional Information Regarding Job Duties and Job Descriptions:

Job duties include additional responsibilities as assigned by one's supervisor or other managers related to the position/department. This job description is meant to describe the general nature and level of work being performed; it is not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and other skills required for the position. The Company reserves the right at any time with or without notice to alter or change job responsibilities, reassign or transfer job position or assign additional job responsibilities, subject to applicable law. The Company shall provide reasonable accommodations of known disabilities to enable a qualified applicant or employee to apply for employment, perform the essential functions of the job, or enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment as required by the law.

If you are an extraordinary professional who thrives in a collaborative work culture and values a rewarding career, then we want to work with you!  Apply today!

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Base pay range (CA, WA, NJ, MA, DC, NYC) per year: $184,100 - $212,500
Base pay range (all other US locations) per year: $167,400 - $193,200 
In addition to the above salary, this role may be eligible for a bonus and equity.