Senior Security Operations / Detection Engineer

LiteLLM is an open-source AI Gateway that gives developers a unified interface to LLM providers. We’re looking for a Senior Security Operations / Detection Engineer to build and own detection and response across our infrastructure.

ABOUT THE ROLE

You’ll own what we can see and how we respond: log pipelines, detections, runbooks, alert handling, and incident coordination.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role reporting to our security lead. You’ll work directly with engineering to build and operate a detection and response function suited to a small company. San Francisco is preferred.

You’ll own your roadmap, build and run the tooling yourself, and lead incidents with incomplete information. Strong written communication is essential: you’ll coordinate independently with engineers, customers, and vendors across time zones.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Build and maintain security log pipelines and document coverage gaps.

- Build, validate, and tune detections across cloud infrastructure, CI systems, identity providers, and internal services.

- Manage detections as code, with clear documentation and ongoing maintenance.

- Write and maintain a runbook for every alert.

- Define severity-based alert response SLAs and own performance against them.

- Lead incidents from investigation and containment through recovery and follow-up.

- Produce clear incident timelines, reports, and recommendations.

- Measure and improve time to detect and contain threats.

- Automate detection of unexpected identity and access changes and drive remediation.

- Prioritize improvements based on risk and the needs of a small engineering organization.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

- 5+ years of relevant experience.

- Experience building a detection and response function from scratch.

- Hands-on experience building and tuning SIEM detections, preferably in Splunk, and managing them as code.

- Experience building log pipelines from cloud and CI systems.

- Strong familiarity with GitHub, Okta, and cloud audit logs, including their limitations.

- Experience leading incidents end-to-end and making containment decisions on partial information.

- Understanding of OAuth, personal access tokens, OIDC, and how attackers abuse authentication systems.

- Ability to write Python scripts to investigate incidents and automate security operations.

- Strong independent judgment and experience owning priorities with limited oversight.

- Clear communication under pressure and a willingness to surface bad news early.

- Availability to overlap with Pacific working hours.

BONUS POINTS

- You helped build a detection and response function at a growing technology company.

- Experience in managed detection and response or incident response across multiple customer environments.

- Experience partnering closely with engineers in a small, fast-moving team.

WHY JOIN LITELLM?

- Own detection and response across the environment, from collecting logs to leading incidents.

- Build a function around the needs of a small company.

- Work directly with security and engineering to close the gaps you find.

- Set priorities and implement improvements yourself.

ABOUT LITELLM

LiteLLM provides a unified API for LLM providers, along with routing, authentication, budgets, observability, and governance for production AI systems.