Incident Response Engineer Jobs in California
Incident Response Engineer jobs in California sit at the center of one of the most active cybersecurity hiring markets in the country, with demand concentrated in enterprise technology, defense contracting, financial services, and healthcare across roles from junior analysts through principal engineers. The largest hiring volume runs through the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where employers like Google, Northrop Grumman, and Kaiser Permanente maintain deep security teams. Cloud security incident response, threat hunting, and SIEM engineering are the sub-areas drawing the strongest California demand. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Software Engineering Director, AI for Incident Response Responsibilities:
- Define and drive the engineering strategy and roadmap for AI-powered incident response, progressing from investigation and diagnosis to safe, end-to-end mitigation and continuous learning
- Lead the architecture and delivery of an agent that reasons across telemetry, code, configurations, deployments, service dependencies, and incident history to identify root causes and take appropriate action
- Establish a human-on-the-loop operating model with progressive autonomy, explicit policy and permission boundaries, independent validation, auditability, rollback, and clear escalation paths
- Build Opsmate as an extensible platform that combines shared, out-of-the-box capabilities with domain-specific skills and agents contributed by product groups and individual on-call engineers
- Establish trusted evaluation and measurement systems that connect agent quality to customer and reliability outcomes, including investigation accuracy, adoption, time to mitigation, and reduced operational effort
- Partner deeply with product groups, infrastructure teams, product management, and data science to understand what success means for their services and build toward shared outcomes
- Ensure the platform itself meets a high bar for reliability, latency, scale, security, privacy, and cost in Meta’s production environment
- Build and grow an engineering organization that consistently delivers measurable results by attracting, developing, and retaining engineers and engineering managers across distributed systems, reliability, and applied AI
- Create a culture of technical depth, rapid learning, operational excellence, and accountability for realized customer impact
- Contribute to company-wide engineering and AI initiatives, including recruiting, technical standards, and responsible AI practices
Minimum Qualifications:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including experience in technical leadership roles
- 7+ years of engineering management experience, including leading multiple teams or managers and delivering products or systems with measurable impact
- Experience defining and executing engineering strategy for large-scale distributed systems, reliability platforms, developer infrastructure, or production AI systems
- Experience building and operating systems that support critical, always-on production workloads
- Track record of building broadly adopted platforms and driving outcomes across organizational boundaries
- Experience evaluating complex automated systems and establishing safeguards for trustworthy production operation
- Experience building engineering teams through hiring, onboarding, and developing engineers and managers at multiple levels
- Experience partnering cross-functionally with product, data science, and infrastructure organizations
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with incident management, SRE, observability, oncall operations, or automated remediation at significant scale
- Experience designing safe execution systems, including identity, authorization, sandboxing, validation, rollback, and auditability
- Experience building extensible platforms that allow domain teams to contribute specialized capabilities while preserving a coherent user experience and control plane
- Track record of taking a technically ambitious product from early adoption to trusted, broad production use
- Experience managing other engineering managers and building a deep technical and management bench across multiple levels
- Experience operating LLM-based or tool-using agents in production, including evaluation, orchestration, and progressive autonomy
About Meta:
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology. People who choose to build their careers by building with us at Meta help shape a future that will take us beyond what digital connection makes possible today—beyond the constraints of screens, the limits of distance, and even the rules of physics.Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations-ext@meta.com.
$271,000/year to $347,000/year + bonus + equity + benefits
Individual compensation is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Compensation details listed in this posting reflect the base hourly rate, monthly rate, or annual salary only, and do not include bonus, equity or sales incentives, if applicable. In addition to base compensation, Meta offers benefits. Learn more about benefits at Meta.
See All 16 Incident Response Engineer Jobs in California
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Find JobsIncident Response Engineer Jobs by City in California
Where California roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Incident Response Engineer Job Market in California
A snapshot from current California openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring



Top Industries Hiring
- Investment & Asset Management
What California Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in incident response engineer jobs across California.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, information security, or a closely related field
- Hands-on experience with SIEM platforms such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or Chronicle
- Relevant certification such as GCIH, GCFE, CEH, or CISSP recognized by California employers
- Demonstrated ability to lead end-to-end incident investigations from triage through post-mortem
- Proficiency in scripting languages such as Python or PowerShell for automation and log analysis
- Familiarity with cloud environments including AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud and their security tooling
Incident Response Engineer Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become an incident response engineer in California?
Most California employers expect a bachelor's degree in computer science, cybersecurity, or information systems, though equivalent self-taught backgrounds paired with recognized certifications are accepted at many organizations. California does not issue a state license for this role, so the credential that carries the most weight with California hiring teams is an industry certification such as the GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH) or CISSP. Building hands-on experience through a SOC analyst or security operations role is the most reliable path into incident response engineering in this state.
How much do incident response engineers make in California?
Incident response engineers in California earn a median of about $134,440 a year, based on May 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data, ranging from around $58,340 for the lowest 10% to over $222,690 for the top 10%. Pay rises with experience, specialty, and employer.
Which companies hire incident response engineers in California?
Employers hiring incident response engineers in California right now include Google, Twitch, and Meta, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of October 2026. California's concentration of major tech headquarters, defense contractors, and large healthcare systems means consistent year-round demand for this role across a wide range of sectors.
Which California cities have the most incident response engineer jobs?
San Francisco, Irvine, and California account for the most incident response engineer openings in California. The Bay Area leads because of its density of cloud and enterprise technology companies, Los Angeles draws from entertainment, finance, and defense contractors based in the region, and San Diego benefits from the large military and defense technology presence anchored there.
Are there remote incident response engineer jobs in California?
Yes, and more than most security roles, because much of the work centers on log analysis, tool management, and investigation workflows that run entirely through cloud platforms. About 71% of incident response engineer openings tied to California are remote or hybrid as of October 2026, reflecting how broadly distributed security teams have become. Threat intelligence, SIEM engineering, and detection engineering sub-roles tend to be the most remote-accessible, while forensic and on-site IR work remains largely in-person.
How can I get hired as an incident response engineer in California with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is landing a SOC analyst or cybersecurity analyst role first, then moving laterally into incident response once you have live triage experience. Large California employers like Northrop Grumman, Palo Alto Networks, and Kaiser Permanente run associate security programs and early-career pipelines that accept candidates without prior professional experience. Earning the CompTIA Security+ or GCIH certification before you apply strengthens your application considerably, and building a portfolio through capture-the-flag competitions or a home lab is a concrete signal California hiring managers look for when evaluating entry-level candidates.
Where can I find and apply to incident response engineer jobs in California?
You can find and apply to incident response engineer jobs in California on Migrate Mate, which lists current California openings. Search the listings, find roles that fit your experience and target location, and apply directly to the ones that match.
See All 16 Incident Response Engineer Jobs in California
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