Staff Security Engineer - D&R Leader (AI-Native)

Apolloio; United States; Remote; USD 225,000 - 282,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k) plan

Paid holidays

Flex PTO

Parental leave

Health benefits

Life/AD&D/LTD

Travel coverage

FSA/HSA

Job summary

Apollo.io is seeking an experienced leader to own detection and response (D&R) strategy for the Security team, delivering hands-on solutions across detection, automation, and incident response. You’ll guide multi-quarter initiatives, mentor engineers, and raise the bar for security in a fast-growing SaaS company.

In this role, you’ll implement AI-native D&R, build detections, and coordinate with Engineering, Legal, and Leadership to improve MTTA/MTTR while maintaining scalable, cost-aware

Qualifications

• 8+ years in detection and response, detection engineering, security engineering or IR.
• Track record of leading D&R strategy or multi-quarter initiatives with measurable results.
• Hands-on experience designing detection architecture and shipping detection systems on Panther or similar SIEM.
• Strong Python, Git, CI/CD and detection-as-code skills.
• Experience leading high-severity incidents in cloud and SaaS environments.
• Cloud and SaaS expertise, ideally GCP, with familiarity of tools like Google Workspace, Okta, GitHub, Slack, Atlassian, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Kandji, Snowflake.
• Sound judgment with incomplete information and ability to influence leaders without formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Own D&R strategy and turn it into multi-quarter initiatives tied to Security KRs.
• Work with Engineering, Infrastructure and IT so logging and response readiness are planned early.
• Set D&R standards: detections and response as code, review practices, playbook quality.
• Mentor engineers to own detections and lead incidents, and raise hiring standards.
• Own detection architecture and the multi-quarter coverage plan; log sources, enrichment, correlation, alert routing, cost at scale.
• Own security observability: telemetry onboarding, signal quality, threat intel inputs and alert tuning.
• Run the detection lifecycle: intake, tests, replay, attack simulation, and coverage gap reviews.
• Ship MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detections, threat hunts and automations via Git and CI/CD.
• Own and improve IR plan: severity model, roles, escalation, communications, on-call and playbooks.
• Lead high-severity incidents as senior tech lead or incident commander across cloud, SaaS, and corporate systems.
• Set AI-native standards for triage, enrichment, investigation and response with guardrails.

Skills

Detection strategy

Detection engineering

Python

Git

CI/CD

Detection-as-code

Incident leadership

Cloud/SaaS expertise

GCP

Cloudflare

CrowdStrike

Kandji

Snowflake

Tools

Panther

Python

GitHub

Slack

Google Workspace

Okta

Atlassian

Cloudflare

CrowdStrike

Kandji

Snowflake

Job description

Apollo.io is seeking an experienced leader to own detection and response (D&R) strategy for the Security team, delivering hands-on solutions across detection, automation, and incident response. You’ll guide multi-quarter initiatives, mentor engineers, and raise the bar for security in a fast-growing SaaS company.

In this role, you’ll implement AI-native D&R, build detections, and coordinate with Engineering, Legal, and Leadership to improve MTTA/MTTR while maintaining scalable, cost-aware