Staff Detection & Response Engineer

Kikoff•San Francisco, CA

10d•$337,700 - $387,200

About The Position

Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money. We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially. This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact. Kikoff protects millions of customers and their financial data. This role owns the Detection & Response pillar: how we see what's happening across our environment, how fast we know when something is wrong, and how well we respond when it is. You will own and dictate the detection and response roadmap. You define the detection strategy, decide what gets built versus bought, and drive the program from "we have tools" to "we have coverage we can prove." This isn't a SOC analyst seat. You're building the detection capability for a fintech handling sensitive financial data, and you'll have real ownership from day one.

Requirements

6+ years in security with meaningful detection engineering and incident response experience in cloud-native environments (AWS strongly preferred)
You've written detections yourself: SIEM rules, or detection-as-code pipelines, and you've owned the false positive rate that came with them
Hands-on incident response experience. You've led real incidents, not just participated in them
Strong command of Cloud Native logging and detection surfaces
Experience with EDR at fleet scale and identity-based detection
Fluency in at least one language for automation (Python, Go, Ruby, or similar)
Comfortable in a fintech regulated environment

Nice To Haves

You've stood up a detection program from scratch or near-scratch
Detections for AI/LLM and agentic system abuse
Insider threat and unauthorized access investigation experience
Consumer fintech or financial services background

Responsibilities

Own the D&R roadmap end to end: telemetry strategy, detection engineering, alert quality, response process, and the metrics that prove coverage
Decide our detection architecture. What we log, where it lands, what we build in-house, and where our partner tools fits.
Set the bar for signal quality. Kill noisy alerts, tune what stays, and make on-call sustainable
Design and maintain detection coverage across AWS (CloudTrail, GuardDuty, VPC flow), endpoints (SentinelOne EDR), identity (Okta), SaaS, and CI/CD
Write detections as code: versioned, tested, mapped to real threats against a consumer fintech
Build the audit logging and telemetry pipelines that give us visibility at scale, including data access monitoring and detections for AI/agentic activity in our environment
Threat model what an attacker actually does to a company like ours, and detect for that, not for a generic MITRE checklist
Own the incident response lifecycle: triage, containment, forensics, postmortem, remediation tracking
Level up our incident process in incident.io: runbooks, severity definitions, escalation paths, tabletop exercises
Lead technical investigations, including insider risk and unauthorized access cases
Build and run the InfoSec on-call rotation with real runbooks, not tribal knowledge
Automate response where it's safe: enrichment, containment actions, ticket hygiene
Be the calm, technical voice in an incident who engineers trust