Rapid7 is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to empower and scale our 24x7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Incident Response (IR) operations. In this role, you will act as a critical technical force multiplier, leveraging modern cloud architectures and AI-driven workflows to automate repetitive tasks and engineer high-impact solutions for front-line cybersecurity practitioners. This is an opportunity to solve high-stakes challenges at scale and shape the future of managed security operations.
About the Team
The Managed Services Engineering team designs, builds, and maintains the mission-critical applications, cloud services, and automation tooling that power Rapid7's global MDR, Vulnerability Management, and Incident Response delivery teams. We partner directly with operational security practitioners to eliminate operational friction and deliver resilient, high-velocity capabilities across our AI-driven security ecosystem.
About the Role
As a Staff Software Engineer, your primary responsibility will be to architect, build, and optimize resilient services and automation tools that accelerate MDR and IR service delivery. Specifically, your focus will be to:
Architect, design, maintain, and monitor highly available, scalable services and internal tools utilizing an AI-first software development lifecycle.
Partner with stakeholders and program management teams to capture operational pain points, translate requirements into technical architecture, and scope delivery milestones.
Collaborate cross-functionally with broader product and platform engineering teams to integrate shared platform services and enhance service delivery efficiency.
Drive technical excellence and robust engineering standards across microservices, cloud infrastructure, and modern deployment pipelines.
Champion pragmatic automated testing, monitoring, and observability strategies to ensure uptime, system health, and rapid incident resolution across production workloads.
Mentor and guide engineering peers on software architecture, design reviews, code quality, and sustainable operational practices.
The skills and qualities you'll bring include
Proven experience architecting, building, and maintaining distributed microservices and backend systems in Python (Django, Django REST Framework, FastAPI, or Flask).
Hands-on proficiency with modern frontend development practices using JavaScript (ES6+) and React to create intuitive self-service tooling for security analysts.
Extensive expertise designing and provisioning scalable AWS cloud infrastructure (ECS, API Gateway, EC2, S3, RDS, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, IAM) using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
Strong track record establishing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and container orchestration with Docker/EKS.
Deep commitment to quality through programmatic testing (unit, integration, linting), live observability, log monitoring, and telemetry tooling (such as DataDog).
Practical experience or strong drive to leverage AI-first software engineering methodologies, including LLM integrations (Claude, Amazon Bedrock) to accelerate automation and developer workflows.
Hold self and teammates accountable for driving end-to-end technical outcomes, establishing clear technical ownership, and delivering reliable software that powers operational workflows.
Build collaborative cross-functional relationships across organizational boundaries to deliver sustainable tooling improvements that create business and customer value.
Make transparent, timely technical decisions that resolve complex challenges, maintain engineering momentum, and incorporate diverse technical perspectives.
Think big and act small by breaking complex architectural initiatives into iterative, time-bound milestones, assessing operational impact, and pivoting when necessary.
Communicate complex technical concepts, system designs, and architectural rationale clearly to both…