Security Engineer, Detect & Respond

Betterment•New York, NY

9d•$145,000 - $180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Security Engineer on the Detect and Respond team at Betterment, you'll help keep our customers and their money safe by building and operating the detection capabilities our security team depends on every day. You'll work alongside experienced engineers on a team that takes software quality seriously, writing reliable alerts, building integrations, contributing to incident response, and improving the on-call experience. This role is a great fit for an engineer who has a security foundation and wants to grow their craft in a collaborative, engineering-forward environment. This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees. New York City: $145,000 - $180,000 This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in security operations or security engineering
Experience with common industry SIEM and SOAR platforms, including writing searches and building alerts
Familiarity with common attacker tactics and techniques, including frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, and an interest in turning threat behavior into practical detections
Exposure to incident response — alert triage, investigation, or containment work
Programming or scripting background; you're comfortable reading and writing code
Enthusiasm for AI tools and workflows, with the judgment to know where their output needs verifying and the appetite to introduce new capabilities responsibly
Awareness of the security questions AI systems raise — agent and connector permissions, prompt injection, non-human identity, data leaving through AI tools — or the drive to get up to speed quickly
Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS) and common SaaS security tools like CrowdStrike or Okta
An interest in security engineering as a craft — you want to build things that are reliable, well-documented, and easy for others to maintain
Curiosity and a willingness to dig into new tools, data sources, and problem spaces
Strong written communication skills — you can write a clear runbook and explain a security concept to a non-technical colleague

Responsibilities

Build and evolve detection and response capabilities across Betterment's infrastructure, with an emphasis on high-signal detection and reliable operational response
Help improve our detections over time, using on-call feedback and false positive trends to quiet what's noisy and close the gaps in what we're missing
Help bring SaaS application logs from across the organization into our SIEM, coordinating with other teams as needed
Participate in Security On Call cycles, responding to alerts and helping improve triage processes over time
Contribute to SIEM administration, including lookups, integrations, and alert hygiene
Build and maintain automations that streamline the on-call experience and reduce manual toil for Security Engineering
Help the team get real leverage out of AI tooling, building it into how we develop detections and run triage, and being open about where it doesn't pull its weight
Build detection coverage for our growing AI surface — agent and connector activity, misuse and prompt injection, company data moving through AI tools — much of it detection work without an established playbook yet
Help build visibility into how AI tools are used across the organization, partnering with our AI Governance and Workforce Security colleagues as that surface grows
Take part in reviews of new systems and data sources alongside engineering partners, helping work out what telemetry we need and what we'd want to detect before those systems ship
Support incident response — triage, investigation, and containment — and help keep our response playbooks current as we learn from each one