Partner 34, Lead Engineer, Incident Response

Theblockchainassociation; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 295,000 - 347,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401K

Vacation policy

Job summary

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is hiring a Lead Engineer, Incident Response to lead and shape the detection and response team. This hands-on role involves investigating incidents, writing detections, building automation, and developing engineers.

You will shape capabilities across cloud, SaaS, identity, and endpoint environments and protect the firm from impersonation and fraud. This role requires in-office presence 2 days a week in our San Francisco, CA office, and offers a salary range tied to

Qualifications

• 9+ years of incident response or detection experience with cloud (AWS/GCP).
• Experience leading security engineers and mentoring teams.
• Proven track record delivering measurable improvements in detection and response.

Responsibilities

• Set the detection and response roadmap, prioritizing threats that matter and measuring coverage.
• Lead and develop engineers through coaching, feedback, and reviews on investigations.
• Develop the team's ability to respond from triage through containment, eradication, and recovery.
• Maintain and test response playbooks and escalation criteria via tabletop exercises.
• Design and improve SIEM architecture and security logging across cloud/identity/endpoint.
• Run hypothesis-driven threat hunts and turn findings into detections.
• Build brand protection capabilities including takedowns of lookalike domains and fraud.
• Build AI-assisted response automation with human-oversight requirements.
• Keep stakeholders aligned and clearly communicate impact and options.
• Lead postmortems and drive corrective actions with remediation teams.
• Participate in Security team's on-call rotation.

Skills

Incident response

Detection engineering

Python

Leadership

Communication

Cross-functional

Threat hunting

Automation

Cloud security

SOAR

Tools

SIEM

KQL

Sigma

EDR

SOAR

Cloud logs

Job description

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic. We invest in seed to venture to growth-stage technology companies, across AI, bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has $100B+ under management across multiple funds.

We’ve established a team that is defined by respect for the entrepreneur and the company-building process; we know what it’s like to be in the founder’s shoes. We’ve invested in companies like Anduril, Airbnb, Coinbase, Cursor, Databricks, Deel, Figma, GitHub, Roblox, SpaceX, and Stripe. Our team is at the forefront of new technology, helping founders and their companies impact and change the world.

The Role

We're hiring a Lead Engineer, Incident Response to lead and shape a16z's detection and response team. This is a hands-on role: you'll spend a significant portion of your time investigating incidents, writing and reviewing detections, building automation, and making the harder technical response decisions. You'll also manage and develop the engineers on the team.

You’ll build and improve detection and response capabilities across the firm's cloud, SaaS, identity, and endpoint environments, shaping the roadmap, tooling, threat hunting, and response practices. You’ll also develop capabilities to protect the firm against impersonation and fraud. You’ll work closely with Security Engineering, IT, Legal, Compliance, and other cross‑functional teams to put these capabilities into practice and turn lessons from incidents into better detections, tooling, and controls.

Venture capital firms face threats that extend beyond their infrastructure: capital call wire fraud, impersonation, and social engineering against employees and partners, alongside attacks by organized criminal and nation‑state groups. Your work protects sensitive firm and limited partner (LP) information, financial transactions, and the relationships the firm depends on.

This role requires an in‑office presence 2 days a week in our San Francisco, CA office.

To join our team, you should be excited to:

• Set the detection and response roadmap, prioritizing the threats that matter most to the firm and measuring detection coverage, alert quality, and response effectiveness
• Lead and develop engineers through coaching, feedback, performance management, and technical reviews, working alongside them on investigations and engineering projects
• Develop the team's ability to respond from triage through containment, eradication, and recovery, including vendor incidents. Lead major incidents, coordinate a16z's technical response with system owners and affected providers, and accelerate decisions requiring leadership or Legal approval
• Maintain and test response playbooks and escalation criteria through cross‑functional tabletop exercises and incident simulations
• Design and improve SIEM architecture and security logging with Security Engineering and IT, expanding detection coverage across cloud, identity, and endpoint environments, including EDR. Write, review, test, and tune detections as code, using relevant MITRE ATT&CK techniques to assess coverage and working with system owners to close visibility gaps
• Run hypothesis‑driven threat hunts informed by threat intelligence and prior investigations, turning findings into new detections
• Build and improve brand protection capabilities including monitoring, investigation, and takedowns of lookalike domains, fraudulent websites, and social media accounts
• Build AI‑assisted response automation. Evaluate accuracy and reliability before deployment and define where human judgment and approvals are required
• Keep technical and non‑technical stakeholders aligned during incidents, including IT, Legal, Compliance, Finance, and investing teams. Clearly communicate impact, uncertainty, response options, and next steps
• Develop the team's postmortem practices, lead reviews of root causes and contributing factors, and drive corrective actions to completion with the teams responsible for remediation
• Participate in the Security team's on‑call rotation

Minimum Qualifications

• 9+ years of incident response or detection and response experience, or equivalent demonstrated impact, with depth in cloud incident response across AWS and GCP
• Prior experience managing security engineers, including coaching and performance management, while remaining technically hands‑on
• A track record of building and leading detection and response programs, making architecture and prioritization decisions, and delivering measurable improvements
• Experience leading high‑stakes incidents across cloud, SaaS, identity, and endpoint environments, including forensic investigation, containment, recovery, and postmortems
• Strong detection engineering skills, including SIEM query languages or rule formats such as KQL or Sigma, detection‑as‑code, testing, and tuning
• Experience designing SIEM and security log pipelines and using cloud logs, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and security orchestration and automation (SOAR) tools in investigations and response. We value transferable capability over experience with a specific product
• Experience running hypothesis‑driven threat hunts and investigating sophisticated attacks, including identity compromise, social engineering, and data exfiltration
• Strong Python skills and experience building and reviewing maintainable security automation
• Working knowledge of AI and agent systems, including their limitations and security risks when used in triage and response workflows
• Experience leading cross‑functional security work and communicating incident impact, uncertainty, and technical trade‑offs clearly to non‑technical stakeholders and senior leaders
• Sound judgment under pressure, balancing security risk and business impact and recognizing when to elevate
• Low ego, high empathy, and a track record of effective collaboration across teams

GCIH or an equivalent incident response certification is a bonus but not required.

The anticipated salary range for this role is between $295,000 - $347,000, actual starting pay may vary based on a range of factors which can include experience, skills, and scope.

This role is eligible to participate in the a16z carry program and various discretionary bonus programs as well as benefit and perquisite plans including health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401K plan, vacation, and sick leave.

a16z culture

• We do only first class business and only in a first class way
• We take a long view of relationships, because we are in the relationship business
• We believe in the future and bet the firm that way
• We are all different, we recognize that, and we win
• We celebrate the good times
• We do it for the team
• We play to win

At a16z we are always looking to hire the absolute best talent and recognize that diversity in our experiences and backgrounds is what makes us stronger. We hire candidates of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital or family status, disability, Veteran status, and any other status. These differences are what enables us to work towards the future we envision for ourselves, our portfolio companies, and the World.

Our organization participates in E-Verify. Click here to learn about E-Verify.

Andreessen Horowitz hereby reserves the right to make use of any unsolicited resumes received from outside recruiting agencies and / or individual recruiters without being responsible for payment of any fees asserted from the use of unsolicited resumes.