Staff Security Engineer

Remitly•Seattle, WA

3d•$212,000 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Remitly moves billions of dollars across borders for millions of customers, which makes it a target. Nation-state actors, financially motivated crews, supply-chain attackers, and fraud rings all want a piece of that money, and there are more of them every year. Each one is getting better at the work. To stay ahead, Remitly has brought four security functions into a single Adversary Management directorate: Threat Intelligence (SIFT), Detection & Response (DART), Vulnerability Management, and Red Team. The goal is to understand the adversaries who want to do financial and material harm to Remitly and our customers, and to get out in front of them. These functions depend on each other every day, and that only works with a strong program backbone connecting the pillars. We're looking for a Staff Security Engineer to join Detection & Response as a senior individual contributor and technical leader. You'll lead through technical depth and influence rather than through direct reports, working alongside our other senior engineers. Expect to own a significant area of the sub-domain: setting its technical direction for the next few years, designing the systems and analytics that catch sophisticated adversaries, leading our hardest incidents, and making the engineers around you better. You'll work with a "detection as code" mindset, and your impact will come as much from the standards, automation, and mentorship you create as from the detections you write yourself. The work directly protects Remitly's data and our customers' money.

Requirements

7+ years in security or systems engineering, with 5+ of those years in threat detection and response (or a closely related sub-domain), preferably in a cloud-first environment (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).
Recognized subject-matter expertise across detection and response: detection engineering, threat analysis, incident investigation and response, forensics and response tooling, and analytic tools and techniques.
A track record of owning a program or sub-domain strategy and delivering a multi-year roadmap that produces measurable risk reduction.
Deep, hands-on expertise with EDR, SIEM, SOAR, and detection-as-code pipelines.
Experience designing, building, or integrating AI-enabled systems to accelerate technical and non-technical workflows.
Ability to evaluate where AI can safely add value, design reliable AI-assisted workflows, and implement production-ready solutions with appropriate security, privacy, monitoring, and human-review controls.
Proficiency in writing and reading code and queries, whether hand-written or AI/agent-assisted (e.g., Python, scripting, query languages like SPL/KQL), enough to set the patterns others follow and to review their work.
A proven ability to lead through complex, high-stakes situations and to drive long-standing or intractable problems to resolution.
Experience mentoring and coaching engineers, and influencing teams to act on security risk without holding authority over them.
Strong written and verbal communication. You can pitch the message to the audience, and you operate with discretion.
Bachelor's degree in a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Strong alignment to our mission and values.

Responsibilities

Drive the strategy for your area. You'll read the current state of the sub-domain and its threat vectors, define the objectives that follow from it, and build a roadmap that looks one to three years out and delivers risk reduction in stages. That includes framing the build-vs-buy calls and weighing acceptable risk against what it costs to reduce.
Shape the architecture and direction of Remitly's logging, alerting, and investigation platforms across cloud and corporate environments, and drive the automation that makes detection and response faster.
Be a senior escalation point for the hardest, highest-severity investigations. When something major happens, you'll drive the response across teams and the wider Adversary Management directorate, write the COEs, and push through the systemic fixes that close root causes for good.
Review new products and architectures for risk and lead design reviews so detection and response are built in before launch. A lot of the value here is catching the long-term risks that come from architecture or process gaps spanning multiple teams.
Mentor other security engineers and raise the quality bar through design and code reviews.
Lead training and learning sessions across the organization.
Establish and approve Detection & Response guidance, contribute to Remitly's Security Standards, and help shape Security Policy.
Work across engineering, infrastructure, and the other Adversary Management pillars (Threat Intelligence, Vulnerability Management, & Red Team) to widen coverage, adjusting how you communicate depending on whether you're talking to engineers or to leadership.
Take part in the on-call rotation as a senior responder.