Job Description

Staff Security Engineer - Detection and Response (L4)

Location: San Ramon, CA; Reno, NV

About Ridgeline

Ridgeline is the industry cloud platform for investment management. It was founded by visionary tech entrepreneur Dave Duffield (co-founder of both PeopleSoft and Workday) to apply his successful formula of solving operational business challenges with bold innovation and human connectivity to the unique needs of the investment management industry.

Ridgeline started with a clean sheet of paper and a deep bench of experts bound by a set of core values and motivated to revolutionize an industry underserved by its current tech offerings. We are building a new, modern platform in the public cloud, purpose-built for the investment management industry and we are prioritizing security, agility, and usability to empower business like never before.

With a growing campus in Reno and offices in New York, Lake Tahoe, and the Bay Area, Ridgeline is proud to have built a fast-growing, people-first company that has been recognized by Fast Company as a "Best Workplace for Innovators," by The Software Report as a "Top 100 Software Company," and by Forbes as one of "America's Best Startup Employers."

The Opportunity

As a member of the Detections and Response Team (DART) at Ridgeline, you will bring your expertise and new ideas to help develop and execute our Detections and Response roadmap. Acting as a significant architect for the systems overseeing our critical infrastructure - both within AWS and across our broader technical landscape - you will apply your expertise to elevate our collective detection coverage and lead the response to our highest-impact security events. Additionally, in this AI-forward role, you will engineer and validate robust, AI-augmented detection and response pipelines while serving as a key point person to ensure our standards for responsible and fluent AI usage remain relevant and effective.

At Ridgeline, the workplace culture is just as important as the products we build. We value ownership, transparency, and a bias toward action - which means we’re always looking for solutions rather than just identifying problems. We’re a team that chooses growth over comfort, owns our setbacks as much as our wins, and thrives on the kind of collaboration that pushes everyone to do their best work. If that’s the environment where you do your best work, we would be interested to meet you.

The impact you will have:

• Shape the DART roadmap based on business priorities and threat models, proactively identifying detection requirements during the design phase of new features and infrastructure.
• Eliminate detection gaps by performing variant analysis to close entire classes of vulnerabilities rather than addressing individual findings.
• Architect AI-powered detection and triage pipelines that maintain accuracy and reduce manual effort, minimizing false positives so every alert warrants a response.
• Collaborate as a key architect for our SIEM, SOAR, and adjacent security platforms, designing scalable, resilient ingestion, enrichment, and alerting frameworks.
• Own the technical architecture and maturity of our incident response program, guiding the response to complex high-impact events, interfacing with leadership during major incidents, and driving findings to systemic remediation.
• Set the technical direction for DART-owned codebases and infrastructure, making sound architectural tradeoffs that balance speed, correctness, and maintainability.
• Establish team standards for the effective and responsible use of AI in detection and response workflows, including appropriate human-in-the-loop guardrails.
• Influence security strategy across engineering organizations, building consensus with Staff+ engineers through technical credibility instead of unilateral directives.
• Elevate the team's technical expertise by mentoring junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, collaborative problem solving, and knowledge sharing.

What we look for:

• 8+ years working in detection, security operations, incident response, or software engineering, with a proven track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives.
• Advanced proficiency in Python (preferred) or another high-level language like Kotlin or TypeScript.
• Demonstrated skill engineering AI/LLM-driven systems: it is essential you are capable of building augmented detection, triage, and investigation workflows and rigorously validating their output for correctness and risk.
• Expertise authoring detections mapped to attacker TTPs (e.g., MITRE ATT&CK).
• Extensive background building and operating detection-as-code and alerting pipelines, tuned for signal quality and noise reduction.
• Strong command of the AWS ecosystem, specifically across logging and telemetry (CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, GuardDuty, CloudWatch), investigative tools (Athena, IAM analysis), and compute (Lambda, ECS/EKS).
• Fluency with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and CI/CD practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain detection and response decisions clearly to engineers, product partners, and stakeholders.

Bonus:

• History leading complex, high-impact incidents as a technical lead or incident commander.
• Hands-on design of AI agents or LLM-based automation in a security operations context.
• Contributions to open source detection/security tooling or published security research.

Compensation and Benefits

The typical starting salary range for this role is: $205,000 - $256,000. Final compensation amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amount listed above.

As an employee at Ridgeline, you’ll have many opportunities for advancement in your career and can make a true impact on the product.

In addition to the base salary, Ridgeline employees can participate in our Company Stock Plan subject to the applicable Stock Option Agreement. We also offer rich benefits that reflect the kind of organization we want to be: one in which our employees feel valued and are inspired to bring their best selves to work. These include unlimited vacation, educational and wellness reimbursements, and $0 cost employee insurance plafis. Please check out our Careers page for a more comprehensive overview of our perks and benefits.

Ridgeline is proud to be a community-minded, discrimination-free equal opportunity workplace.

Ridgeline processes the information you submit in connection with your application in accordance with the Ridgeline Applicant Privacy Statement (https://www.ridgelineapps.com/legal/candidate-privacy-policy).