Infrastructure Cyber Defense Leader

About the Role

Altera is seeking a technically capable Infrastructure Cyber Defense Leader to lead enterprise infrastructure security strategy, operations, and continuous improvement across network, cloud, on-premises, and hybrid technology environments. The role will oversee network security, cloud security, infrastructure protection, vulnerability management, security architecture, cyber resilience, and risk assessment activities. The successful candidate will help protect semiconductor design environments, operations, intellectual property, corporate systems, engineering platforms, and critical business services. This position will work closely with Information Security, Infrastructure, Cloud, Network Engineering, IT Engineering, IT Operations, Compliance, Legal, Internal Audit, and business stakeholders. It is best suited for a hands‑on security leader who can translate enterprise risk into practical security controls, measurable outcomes, and resilient technology architectures.

What You’ll Do

Infrastructure Defense Strategy and Operations

Lead the strategy, operating model, and day-to-day execution of infrastructure defense capabilities across enterprise, cloud, data center, remote access, and engineering environments.

Establish security standards, operating procedures, control objectives, service-level expectations, and performance metrics for infrastructure security.

Assess infrastructure risks and prioritize remediation based on business criticality, exploitability, exposure, and potential impact to production, engineering, intellectual property, and customer commitments.

Develop and maintain infrastructure security roadmaps aligned to business priorities, technology strategy, threat intelligence, and applicable security frameworks.

Monitor operational performance, control effectiveness, open risks, exceptions, remediation commitments, and unresolved security gaps.

Identify opportunities to improve automation, visibility, control consistency, operational efficiency, and cyber resilience.

Network Security

Oversee enterprise network security capabilities, including firewalls, secure web gateways, intrusion prevention, network segmentation, remote access, DNS security, DDoS protection, and network monitoring.

Partner with Network Engineering to design and implement secure connectivity across corporate, cloud, data center, engineering and third-party environments.

Improve segmentation and access controls for sensitive semiconductor design assets, production systems, engineering networks, and high-value intellectual property.

Review network security configurations, rule sets, architecture changes, and exceptions to ensure alignment with approved standards.

Establish measurable improvements in network visibility, control coverage, policy hygiene, and response readiness.

Support investigation and remediation of network-based threats, misconfigurations, unauthorized access, and control failures.

Cloud Security — Azure and AWS

Lead security architecture, governance, and operational control implementation across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and hybrid cloud environments.

Define and enforce cloud security standards for identity, access management, network controls, encryption, logging, monitoring, secrets management, workload protection, and data security.

Oversee security posture management and remediation activities across Azure and AWS accounts, subscriptions, landing zones, and cloud workloads.

Partner with Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams to integrate security into infrastructure‑as‑code, CI/CD pipelines, container platforms, serverless services, and platform engineering practices.

Improve cloud detection, logging, configuration compliance, vulnerability visibility, and incident response readiness.

Review cloud architecture designs and technology changes for security risks, control gaps, resilience implications, and regulatory requirements.

Support cloud migration and modernization initiatives by embedding secure‑by‑design principles into solution delivery.

Application Security and DevSecOps

Lead and mature application security and DevSecOps capabilities across internally developed applications, APIs, cloud‑native services, and engineering platforms.

Establish secure SDLC requirements, application security standards, security review processes, and security control expectations.

Partner with Software Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Cloud teams to integrate security into development, testing, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure‑as‑code, containers, Kubernetes platforms, and software delivery processes.

Oversee application security testing capabilities including SAST, DAST, SCA, secrets detection, API security testing, container security scanning, and infrastructure‑as‑code security assessments.

Facilitate threat modeling, secure design reviews, secure coding initiatives, and risk assessments for new applications and major technology changes.

Establish risk‑based remediation processes and performance metrics for application security findings and software supply‑chain risks.

Coordinate application penetration testing, remediation validation, and secure release readiness activities.

Improve software supply‑chain security through dependency governance, SBOM visibility, artifact integrity controls, and code‑signing practices.

Infrastructure Security and Cyber Resilience

Protect compute, storage, virtualization, operating systems, databases, endpoints, identity infrastructure, backup platforms, and other foundational technology services.

Assess technology dependencies and identify breaking points that could affect the recoverability and availability of critical business.

Drive initiatives that strengthen infrastructure resilience against ransomware, destructive attacks, identity compromise, cloud disruption, and technology failures.

Partner with IT Operations and Disaster Recovery teams to validate backup protection, recovery controls, restoration procedures, and resilience assumptions.

Support infrastructure hardening, secure configuration management, privileged access controls, endpoint protection, and administrative activity monitoring.

Lead infrastructure security reviews for new platforms, major changes, acquisitions, third‑party services, and high‑risk technology implementations.

Vulnerability Management

Lead the enterprise vulnerability management program across network devices, servers, endpoints, cloud resources, applications, containers, engineering systems, and assets.

Establish risk‑based prioritization, remediation service levels, exception processes, escalation paths, and executive reporting.

Improve asset inventory accuracy, scanning coverage, authenticated scanning, cloud visibility, vulnerability validation, and remediation tracking.

Partner with Infrastructure, Cloud, Application, Engineering, and IT teams to reduce exposure to critical and actively exploited vulnerabilities.

Track remediation performance using measurable indicators such as critical vulnerability aging, remediation timeliness, exposure reduction, asset coverage, and exception closure.

Coordinate vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, configuration reviews, attack‑surface assessments, and remediation validation.

Provide risk‑based reporting to security leadership, technology owners, audit teams, and executive stakeholders.

Security Architecture and Risk Assessments

Lead security architecture reviews for infrastructure, cloud, network, identity, data center, and technology transformation initiatives.

Translate business and technical requirements into secure, scalable, and resilient architecture patterns.

Conduct risk assessments that identify control gaps, attack paths, dependencies, concentration risks, and potential business impacts.

Review proposed designs, technology changes, exceptions, and compensating controls against enterprise security standards.

Maintain architecture principles, reference designs, control requirements, decision records, and security review documentation.

Facilitate structured discussions with technical teams to evaluate technology landscapes against security, resilience, and recovery requirements.

Provide practical recommendations that balance risk reduction, operational feasibility, performance, availability, and business timelines.

Governance, Reporting, and Continuous Improvement

Establish infrastructure defense governance meetings, action tracking, escalation processes, and cross‑functional follow‑up.

Prepare dashboards and management reports covering: Vulnerability exposure and remediation performance; Network and cloud control coverage; Security architecture review status; Open risks, exceptions, and remediation commitments; Cloud security posture and configuration compliance; Critical asset protection; Infrastructure resilience and recovery readiness.

Conduct periodic quality reviews of security assessments, architecture decisions, remediation evidence, control performance, and operational outcomes.

Identify and implement improvements to infrastructure defense maturity, automation, data quality, operational efficiency, and stakeholder adoption.

Technical Skills and Technologies

• Network Security: Next‑generation firewalls, secure web gateways, VPN, ZTNA, IDS/IPS, DDoS protection, DNS security, network access control, segmentation, and network traffic analysis.


• Azure Security: Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Policy, Azure Firewall, Azure Key Vault, Azure Monitor, Azure Networking, Azure Security Center capabilities, and Azure landing zones.


• AWS Security: AWS Security Hub, GuardDuty, Inspector, IAM, Organizations, Control Tower, CloudTrail, AWS Config, KMS, VPC security, and centralized logging.


• Infrastructure Security: Windows and Linux security, endpoint protection, server hardening, virtualization, storage, databases, backup platforms, privileged access, patch management, and configuration management.


• Vulnerability Management: Vulnerability scanners, attack‑surface management, penetration testing, configuration assessment, remediation tracking, exception management, and risk‑based prioritization.


• Security Architecture: Zero Trust, secure network architecture, cloud reference architectures, identity‑centric security, segmentation, encryption, resiliency, and secure‑by‑design reviews.


• Security Frameworks: NIST CSF, NIST SP 800‑53, CIS Controls, ISO/IEC 27001, IEC 62443, SOC 2, and SOX/ITGC.


• Application Security: Secure SDLC, threat modeling, secure coding, SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, API security testing, application penetration testing, dependency management, and security review processes.


• DevSecOps & Software Supply Chain Security: CI/CD security, infrastructure‑as‑code security, secrets management, container security, Kubernetes security, software bill of materials (SBOM), artifact integrity, code signing, policy‑as‑code, and automated security controls.

Leadership and People Management

Lead and develop infrastructure security, network security, cloud security, application security, DevSecOps, vulnerability management, cyber resilience, and security architecture capabilities.

Establish clear objectives, role expectations, operating rhythms, quality standards, and performance measures.

Coach team members through technical assessments, architecture decisions, risk discussions, stakeholder interactions, and career development.

Coordinate internal teams, technology owners, and service providers through clear accountability and escalation processes.

Promote secure‑by‑design thinking, disciplined documentation, knowledge sharing, automation, and continuous learning.

Foster a culture of operational ownership, timely escalation, practical risk management, and measurable improvement.

Stakeholder Management

Partner with the CISO organization, CIO, IT Infrastructure, Network Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, DevOps, Engineering, Compliance, Legal, Internal Audit, Procurement, and business leadership.

Facilitate architecture reviews, risk assessments, remediation planning, resilience exercises, and executive working sessions.

Communicate infrastructure security risks, control gaps, remediation options, and residual risk in clear business terms.

Build effective relationships with cloud providers, managed security service providers, technology vendors, and strategic suppliers.

Support leadership decisions by providing actionable analysis of risk, cost, feasibility, operational impact, and security outcomes.

What Success Looks Like During the first six to twelve months, you will be expected to:

• Establish clear governance, performance measures, and operating procedures for infrastructure defense.


• Improve visibility and control coverage across network, Azure, AWS, on‑premises and engineering environments.


• Reduce critical and actively exploited vulnerability exposure through measurable remediation improvements.


• Establish consistent security architecture review and risk assessment processes.


• Improve cloud security posture, configuration compliance, logging, monitoring, and identity protection.


• Strengthen network segmentation, infrastructure hardening, privileged access, and cyber resilience controls.


• Improve readiness for ransomware, cloud disruption, infrastructure compromise, and technology recovery scenarios.


• Establish reliable infrastructure security dashboards and executive reporting.


• Build a collaborative, accountable, and technically strong infrastructure defense capability.


• Expand automated application security coverage across source code, open-source dependencies, APIs, containers, infrastructure‑as‑code, and CI/CD pipelines.


• Improve remediation performance for critical application and software supply-chain vulnerabilities through measurable reductions in exposure and remediation timelines.

Salary Range

The pay range below is for Bay Area California only. Actual salary may vary based on a number of factors including job location, job‑related knowledge, skills, experiences, trainings, etc. We also offer incentive opportunities that reward employees based on individual and company performance. $187,000 - $270,000 USD

We use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for the position. Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations.

Job Type and Location

Job Type: Regular Shift: Shift 1 (United States of America) Primary Location: San Jose, California, United States Additional Locations:

Posting Statement

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military and veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by local law, regulation, or ordinance.

About Altera

Altera: Accelerating Innovators Altera provides leadership programmable solutions that are easy‑to‑use and deploy in applications from cloud to edge, offering limitless AI possibilities. Our end‑to‑end broad portfolio of products including FPGAs, CPLDs, Intellectual Property, development tools, System on Modules, SmartNICs and IPUs provide the flexibility to accelerate innovation. Altera is helping to shape the future through pioneering innovation that unlocks extraordinary possibilities for everyone on the planet.