Security Operations Engineer

Who We Are: Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it. Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Our Team Members: We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply. 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 onboard security logs, develop and tune detections, keep alerts actionable, maintain operational dashboards, and automate repeatable response actions. You will be hands-on and operationally minded. You will keep log onboarding, detection quality, and alert handling consistent, and you will turn 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. Things You Get To 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. Who You Are (Must-Haves): * Excited 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 * Willing 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 Who You Might Be (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 Alpaca is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce. 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