[Hiring] Staff Engineer, Detection and Response @Apollo.io

Role Description

You’ll lead detection and response (D&R) strategy for Apollo’s Security team, and you’ll deliver it hands-on. You’ll build detection systems, response automations, and investigation tools in weeks, not months. You’ll lead our most complex incidents. You’ll also set the standards and architecture that let the team catch and contain real threats without depending on any one person.

What you’ll do

• Strategy and influence
  • Own D&R strategy and turn it into multi-quarter initiatives tied to Security KRs.
  • Report progress and risks to leadership in business terms.
  • Work with Engineering, Infrastructure, and IT so logging, telemetry, and response readiness are planned into their roadmaps early.
  • Set D&R standards: detections and response as code, review practices, playbook quality, and AI-assisted workflows.
  • Mentor engineers to own detections and lead incidents, and help raise the hiring bar.
• Detection engineering and observability
  • Own detection architecture and the multi-quarter coverage plan: log sources, enrichment, correlation, alert routing, and cost at scale.
  • Own security observability: telemetry onboarding, signal quality, threat intel inputs, and alert tuning.
  • Run the detection lifecycle: intake and prioritization, unit tests, replay against historical data, attack simulation, and regular reviews of coverage gaps, latency, false positives, and MTTD.
  • Stay hands-on: ship MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detections, threat hunts, and automations in Panther and Python via Git and CI/CD.
• Incident response
  • Own and improve the IR plan: severity model, roles, escalation, communications, on-call, and playbooks for our top scenarios.
  • Build IR readiness: tabletop exercises with Engineering, Legal, Fraud, and leadership, plus response automation and forensic readiness.
  • Measure IR quality (MTTA/MTTR by severity, repeat incidents, action closure) and feed every incident’s lessons back into detections, automation, and process.
  • Lead high-severity incidents as senior technical lead or incident commander across cloud, SaaS, and corporate systems.
• AI-native by default
  • You’ll set the standard for AI-augmented D&R.
  • You’ll use AI and agents for triage, enrichment, investigation, and response, with guardrails and human-in-the-loop where it matters.
  • You’ll measure the gains in speed, coverage, and signal quality.
  • You’ll also help define how we detect misuse of Apollo’s own AI systems and agent features.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in detection and response, detection engineering, security engineering, or incident response.
• 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 a modern SIEM (Panther highly valued).
• Strong Python, Git, CI/CD, and detection-as-code skills.
• Experience leading high-severity incidents in cloud and SaaS environments and improving the IR process behind them.
• Cloud and SaaS expertise, ideally GCP, plus familiarity with tools like Google Workspace, Okta, GitHub, Slack, Atlassian, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Kandji, and Snowflake.
• Sound judgment with incomplete information, and the influence to align technical and non-technical leaders without formal authority.

Nice to have

• Staff, Lead, or Principal-level experience at a high-growth cloud or SaaS company.
• AI-assisted triage, investigation, or response in production, with a clear view of its limits.
• Public security work (detection content, open-source tools, talks, research) or certifications such as GCIA, GCIH, or GCED.

How success is measured

• A D&R strategy tied to Security KRs, with telemetry work committed in other teams’ roadmaps.
• Better detection coverage and precision for top threats, and a tested IR process with faster MTTD/MTTR and fewer repeat incidents.
• AI-assisted triage and response in production, with a measurable drop in manual toil.

Tech stack

• Panther (SIEM), Python, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Google Workspace, Okta, GitHub, Slack, Atlassian, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Kandji, Snowflake.
• AI tools: Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Glean.

Pay Transparency Range

$225,400 — $281,800 USD

Benefits

• Equity; company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses.
• 401(k) plan; at least 10 paid holidays per year, flex PTO, and parental leave.
• Employee assistance program and wellbeing benefits.
• Global travel coverage.
• Life/AD&D/STD/LTD insurance.
• FSA/HSA and medical, dental, and vision benefits.

Company Description

Apollo.io is the leading go-to-market solution for revenue teams, trusted by over 500,000 companies and millions of users globally, from rapidly growing startups to some of the world's largest enterprises. Founded in 2015, the company is one of the fastest growing companies in SaaS, raising approximately $250 million to date and valued at $1.6 billion.