Staff Engineer, Detection and Response

Apollo.io is the leading go-to-market solution for revenue teams, trusted by over 500,000 companies and millions of users globally, from rapidly growing startups to some of the world's largest enterprises. Founded in 2015, the company is one of the fastest growing companies in SaaS, raising approximately $250 million to date and valued at $1.6 billion. Apollo.io provides sales and marketing teams with easy access to verified contact data for over 210 million B2B contacts and 35 million companies worldwide, along with tools to engage and convert these contacts in one unified platform.

By helping revenue professionals find the most accurate contact information and automating the outreach process, Apollo.io turns prospects into customers.

Apollo raised a series D in 2023 and is backed by top-tier investors, including Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and more, and counts the former President and COO of Hubspot, JD Sherman, among its board members.

You’ll lead detection and response (D&R) strategy for Apollo’s Security team, and you’ll deliver it hands‑on. You’ll build detection systems, response automations and investigation tools in weeks, not months. You’ll lead our most complex incidents. You’ll also set the standards and architecture that let the team catch and contain real threats without depending on any one person.

• Own D&R strategy and turn it into multi-quarter initiatives tied to Security KRs. Report progress and risks to leadership in business terms.
• Work with Engineering, Infrastructure and IT so logging, telemetry and response readiness are planned into their roadmaps early.
• Set D&R standards: detections and response as code, review practices, playbook quality, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Mentor engineers to own detections and lead incidents, and help raise the hiring bar.

• Own detection architecture and the multi-quarter coverage plan: log sources, enrichment, correlation, alert routing, and cost at scale.
• Own security observability: telemetry onboarding, signal quality, threat intel inputs and alert tuning.
• Run the detection lifecycle: intake and prioritization, unit tests, replay against historical data, attack simulation, and regular reviews of coverage gaps, latency, false positives and MTTD.
• Stay hands‑on: ship MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detections, threat hunts and automations in Panther and Python via Git and CI/CD.
• Own and improve the IR plan: severity model, roles, escalation, communications, on‑call and playbooks for our top scenarios.
• Build IR readiness: tabletop exercises with Engineering, Legal, Fraud and leadership, plus response automation and forensic readiness.
• Measure IR quality (MTTA/MTTR by severity, repeat incidents, action closure) and feed every incident’s lessons back into detections, automation and process.
• Lead high‑severity incidents as senior technical lead or incident commander across cloud, SaaS and corporate systems.

You’ll set the standard for AI-augmented D&R. You’ll use AI and agents for triage, enrichment, investigation and response, with guardrails and human-in-the-loop where it matters. You’ll measure the gains in speed, coverage and signal quality. You’ll also help define how we detect misuse of Apollo’s own AI systems and agent features.

• 8+ years in detection and response, detection engineering, security engineering or incident response.
• Track record of leading D&R strategy or multi-quarter initiatives with measurable results.
• Hands‑on experience designing detection architecture and shipping detection systems on a modern SIEM (Panther highly valued).
• Strong Python, Git, CI/CD and detection-as-code skills.
• Experience leading high‑severity…