dubai, dubai emirate, United Arab Emirates Unknown Posted Today
$500,000 – $700,000
Job Responsibilities
Lead the SOC operation
Own 24x7 monitoring, triage, investigation, and incident response across all shifts, including escalation paths and on‑call coverage.
Define and enforce SOC runbooks, playbooks, SLAs, and quality standards; audit analyst work for consistency and accuracy.
Serve as incident commander for P1/P2 security incidents and coordinate with IT, legal, communications, and executive stakeholders through resolution and post‑incident review.
Build and develop the team
Recruit, onboard, and retain L1–L3 analysts, threat hunters, and detection engineers; manage shift rosters, capacity, and career paths.
Run structured training, tabletop exercises, and purple‑team sessions; set individual performance goals and conduct regular reviews.
Create a culture of continuous improvement, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
Drive detection and response maturity
Own the detection engineering lifecycle: use‑case development, tuning, false‑positive reduction, and coverage mapping against MITRE ATT&CK and priority threat actors.
Lead adoption of SOAR automation to cut manual effort on repetitive triage and enrichment.
Integrate cyber threat intelligence into detection content, hunting hypotheses, and client/stakeholder advisories.
Evaluate and tune SIEM, EDR/XDR, NDR, email security, and cloud security telemetry to close visibility gaps.
Govern, measure, and report
Define and report SOC KPIs and KRIs (MTTD, MTTR, alert fidelity, coverage, SLA adherence, analyst utilization) to leadership and (clients).
Maintain SOC documentation and evidence to support audits and frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST CSF, and (regional regulatory requirements).
Manage SOC tooling budget, vendor relationships, licensing, and renewals; build business cases for new capabilities.
Engage stakeholders
Present incident summaries, threat briefings, and service performance to senior leadership and (client CISOs / executive sponsors).
Act as a trusted advisor on security posture improvements arising from SOC findings.
(For MSSPs: support pre‑sales with SOC service scoping, SLAs, and onboarding of new clients.)
What You Bring
Required
10+ years in cybersecurity, with at least 3 years managing or leading a SOC or incident response team in a 24x7 operational environment.
Proven experience running a SOC (within an MSSP / for a large enterprise) serving multiple business units or clients.
Deep hands‑on background in SIEM (Sentinet, securonix), EDR/XDR (e.g., CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender, SentinelOne), and SOAR platforms.
Demonstrated incident command experience on major incidents (ransomware, business email compromise, insider threat, cloud compromise) from detection through recovery and lessons learned.
Strong grasp of attacker tradecraft, MITRE ATT&CK, the cyber kill chain, and threat‑informed defense.
Working knowledge of network, endpoint, identity, email, and cloud (Azure/AWS/GCP) security telemetry and log sources.
Experience defining and reporting SOC metrics and SLAs to executive audiences.
Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining security analysts.
Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate technical detail for non‑technical stakeholders.
Certifications (one or more strongly preferred)
GIAC (GCIH, GCIA, GCFA, GMON, GSOM), CISSP, CISM
Vendor certifications
Nice to have
Experience standing up or transforming a SOC (greenfield build, tool migration, or maturity uplift).