Senior Director - Cyber Defense Engineering

Senior Director Of Cyber Defense Architecture & Engineering

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Job Description

The Senior Director of Cyber Defense Architecture & Engineering leads the strategy, design, engineering, and continuous improvement of enterprise detection, response, and threat mitigation capabilities across the enterprise. This role is accountable for building or integrating resilient, intelligence-driven, automated cyber defense platforms spanning endpoint, network, cloud, identity, data, and SaaS environments. This role is responsible for building strong partnerships with technology teams, other corporate support functions, and other Information Security organizations to protect the corporate brand, data, and assets and is responsible for the design, implementation, operation, and maintenance of an information security framework, processes, and systems, that protect the business, services, information and systems against unauthorized use, disclosure, modification, damage, and loss.

The position partners closely with the CISO, Cyber Defense Sr. Leadership, other Information Security Sr. Leaders, and other Technology Leadership teams to establish a vision and strategy required to ensure scalable, measurable, and continuously improving defense capabilities across the applicable security domain in collaboration with other information security domain leaders and partner organizations.

Our employee experience is a strategic priority for our company. Our leaders are accountable for leading with purpose, fairness, and equity. They are responsible for building and developing diverse teams, maintaining a safe and inclusive environment, setting clear priorities, and holding self and team accountable for executing with excellence.

Primary Responsibilities

• Define and execute the enterprise cyber defense architecture strategy aligned to threat landscape and risk appetite in collaboration with Cyber Defense senior leadership.
• Develop layered defense models across endpoint, network, cloud, identity, and SaaS.
• Establish and document detection engineering standards and reference architectures.
• Present defense posture maturity, risk trends, and roadmap to executive leadership.
• Establish the enterprise detection engineering program and lead evaluation of new tools and technologies to support the Cyber Defense ecosystem.
• Define logging standards and telemetry requirements across platforms.
• Collaborate & partner with key stakeholder to oversee use case lifecycle management (creation, tuning, retirement).
• Standardize MITRE ATT&CK mapping across detections.
• Reduce false positives while increasing true positive detection rates in collaboration with Cyber Defense teams.

Oversee or drive a collaborative approach to architecture and engineering of:

• SIEM platforms
• SOAR playbooks
• EDR/XDR solutions
• NDR solutions
• Email security and anti-phishing platforms
• Deception technologies
• Threat intelligence platforms
• Security data lakes and analytics platforms

Integrate defense controls across:

• Public cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Hybrid data centers
• SaaS platforms
• Enterprise networks, endpoints and mobile
• OT/IoT (in partnership with OT sr. cybersecurity leadership)

Additional Responsibilities

• Drive automation, AI/ML integration, and policy-as-code for response workflows in collaboration with Cloud Security and other senior security leaders.
• Enable automated containment and remediation capabilities.
• Partner with Incident Response and Cyber Counter Adversary leadership for operational efficiency and maturity uplifts.
• Support purple team exercises to validate detection and response effectiveness.
• Integrate strategic, tactical, and operational threat intelligence into engineering roadmap.
• Translate threat actor activity into detection content and control enhancements.
• Support M&A security integrations and divestiture disentanglement.
• Ensure compliance with global regulatory regimes (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, FDA/GxP where applicable).
• Establish KPIs, OKRs, and performance dashboards.
• Establish control validation framework.
• Lead breach simulation and continuous control monitoring as needed to support Cyber Defense senior leaders
• Report measurable defense maturity to executive leadership and other senior leaders.
• Lead global team of detection engineers, platform engineers, and automation specialists.
• Establish engineering career paths and succession planning.
• Enterprise financial management and planning experience.
• Follows information security trends within and outside of work with executive leadership to strategize and recommend changes and updates to company.

Qualifications

Education :

• Master's Degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, Information Technology or any other related discipline or equivalent related experience.

Preferred Certifications:

• Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
• Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP)
• GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst (GCIA)
• GIAC Certified Enterprise Defender (GCED)
• GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH)
• Certification in Information Security Strategy Management (CISM)
• Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA)
• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
• Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification

Work Experience:

• 12+ years of directly-related or relevant experience with 8+ years in a managerial capacity, preferably in information security.

Behavioral Skills:

• Coaching and Mentoring
• Creativity & Innovation
• Decision Making
• Leadership Skills
• People Management
• Planning
• Risk-taking

Technical Skills:

• IT Risk Management
• IT Controls
• Cyber Attack Mitigation
• Enterprise IT Management
• Network Security
• Service Level Maintenance
• Information Security Strategy Continuity
• Threat Modelling
• Information Security Strategy Standards (SOX, ISO 27001/27002, COBIT, ITIL, NIST, PCI)

Tools Knowledge:

• Microsoft Office Suite
• Security Tools - CSPM, CWPP, CDR, CNAPP, SIEM, EDR, Email Security Gateway, SOAR, Firewall, Anti-virus, Firewalls, VPN IDS/IPS, AV, proxies, etc.
• Security Testing Tools - Open Source and COTS security tools
• Threat Intelligence Tools
• Vulnerability Testing Tools