Security Operations Engineer - Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. We are a licensed financial services company serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs, totaling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team of 400+ members is diverse, distributed, and deeply committed to open-source contributions. We are backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors. We value curiosity, empathy, and accountability, and thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond.

Your Role

We are seeking a Security Operations Engineer to own the daily operation and continuous improvement of Alpaca’s SIEM and SOAR capabilities. You will be hands-on and operationally minded, onboarding security logs, developing and tuning detections, keeping alerts actionable, maintaining operational dashboards, and automating repeatable response actions. You will ensure log onboarding, detection quality, and alert handling are consistent, turning security signals into action as the business grows.

This role reports to the Enterprise Security Architect and works closely with Security, IT, DevOps, and Engineering. The Security Team is 100% distributed and remote.

What You'll Do

The core responsibilities of the Security Operations Engineer are focused on detection, response automation, operational excellence, and cross-functional coordination.

SIEM Operations and Detection Engineering

• Log Onboarding: Onboard new security log sources across cloud, identity, endpoint, SaaS, and application systems, including parsing, normalization, and data quality checks.
• Detection Development: Build, test, and tune detection rules based on threat intelligence, incident learnings, and emerging attack techniques, mapped to frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
• Alert Quality: Tune, enrich, and manage the lifecycle of detections so alerts stay actionable.
• Detection Coverage: Maintain detections for critical systems and priority attack techniques.
• Operational Dashboards: Build and maintain dashboards for alert volume, ingest health, and response status.

Incident Response & Metrics

• Incident Support: Support security incidents with evidence collection, detection queries, and containment actions, working with IT, Engineering, and external partners.
• Runbooks: Develop and improve alert-handling and incident response runbooks and escalation paths.
• Operational Metrics: Track and report security operations metrics, including mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR).
• On-Call: Participate in the Security Operations on-call rotation after onboarding and cross-training.

SOAR and Response Automation

• Playbooks: Design, build, and maintain SOAR playbooks that automate repeatable response actions, including enrichment, containment, ticketing, and notification.
• Triage and Investigation: Triage, investigate, and respond to security alerts across endpoints, identity, cloud, network, and application logs.
• Threat Hunting: Run hypothesis-driven hunts based on threat intelligence and incident learnings, and turn findings into new detections.

What You'll Bring (Must-Haves)

• Excitement about Alpaca’s mission and what we’re building.
• 3+ years of experience in Security Operations or detection engineering roles.
• Hands-on experience operating and tuning a SIEM.
• Experience building SOAR playbooks or equivalent response automation.
• Working with Linux.
• Scripting or automation experience (Python, Bash) for security operations tasks.
• Experience onboarding and parsing log sources from cloud, identity, and SaaS platforms.
• Strong alert investigation skills across identity, endpoint, network, and cloud environments.
• Understanding of common attacker techniques and detection methodologies.
• Experience supporting security incidents, including evidence collection, detection queries, and containment.
• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially during incidents.
• Comfortable working cross-functionally and handling escalations calmly and decisively.

Bonus Points (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience securing financial, trading, or other highly regulated platforms.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
• Experience with detection-as-code, GitOps, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of cloud security logging (AWS/GCP/Azure) and SaaS security telemetry.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes-hosted security tooling.
• Experience working with a managed SOC or MSSP.
• Security certifications (GCIA, GCIH, GCED, or similar).
• Ability to balance security rigor with operational efficiency and business needs.

How We Take Care of You

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card