Senior Security Operations / Detection Engineer
LiteLLM San Francisco, California, United States · $220K–$280K/yr
Software Development · 11-50 employees
Applying here? Try the free cover letter tool — paste this posting and your résumé, no account needed.
About the role
You will own the end-to-end detection and response function, including building log pipelines, managing detections as code, and leading incident investigations. You will also define response SLAs, maintain runbooks, and automate security operations to improve threat detection and containment.
What they look for
Requirements
The role requires 5+ years of experience in building detection and response functions from scratch, with hands-on expertise in SIEM tools like Splunk. Candidates must possess strong technical skills in cloud security, identity management, Python scripting, and the ability to lead incident response independently.
Benefits
Full description
LiteLLM is an open-source AI Gateway that gives developers a unified interface to LLM providers. We’re looking for a Senior Security Operations / Detection Engineer to build and own detection and response across our infrastructure.
About the role
You’ll own what we can see and how we respond: log pipelines, detections, runbooks, alert handling, and incident coordination.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role reporting to our security lead. You’ll work directly with engineering to build and operate a detection and response function suited to a small company. San Francisco is preferred.
You’ll own your roadmap, build and run the tooling yourself, and lead incidents with incomplete information. Strong written communication is essential: you’ll coordinate independently with engineers, customers, and vendors across time zones.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain security log pipelines and document coverage gaps.
- Build, validate, and tune detections across cloud infrastructure, CI systems, identity providers, and internal services.
- Manage detections as code, with clear documentation and ongoing maintenance.
- Write and maintain a runbook for every alert.
- Define severity-based alert response SLAs and own performance against them.
- Lead incidents from investigation and containment through recovery and follow-up.
- Produce clear incident timelines, reports, and recommendations.
- Measure and improve time to detect and contain threats.
- Automate detection of unexpected identity and access changes and drive remediation.
- Prioritize improvements based on risk and the needs of a small engineering organization.
What we’re looking for
- 5+ years of relevant experience.
- Experience building a detection and response function from scratch.
- Hands-on experience building and tuning SIEM detections, preferably in Splunk, and managing them as code.
- Experience building log pipelines from cloud and CI systems.
- Strong familiarity with GitHub, Okta, and cloud audit logs, including their limitations.
- Experience leading incidents end-to-end and making containment decisions on partial information.
- Understanding of OAuth, personal access tokens, OIDC, and how attackers abuse authentication systems.
- Ability to write Python scripts to investigate incidents and automate security operations.
- Strong independent judgment and experience owning priorities with limited oversight.
- Clear communication under pressure and a willingness to surface bad news early.
- Availability to overlap with Pacific working hours.
Bonus points
- You helped build a detection and response function at a growing technology company.
- Experience in managed detection and response or incident response across multiple customer environments.
- Experience partnering closely with engineers in a small, fast-moving team.
Why join LiteLLM?
- Own detection and response across the environment, from collecting logs to leading incidents.
- Build a function around the needs of a small company.
- Work directly with security and engineering to close the gaps you find.
- Set priorities and implement improvements yourself.
About LiteLLM
LiteLLM provides a unified API for LLM providers, along with routing, authentication, budgets, observability, and governance for production AI systems.
