Security Operations Lead

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end-to-end, simplified solutions.

The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

The Defender Experts for XDR group is looking to hire a Security Operations Lead to help us harness the power of Microsoft’s trillions of security signals to quickly identify and report the latest human adversary behaviors, drive critical context-rich alerts, build new tools and automations in support of helping customers identify threats, and drive innovations for detecting advanced attacker tradecraft. 

This position is on-site only and will requiere to be on rotation for weekends. 

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

Defender Experts empowers enterprises to detect, investigate, and respond to advanced attacks and data breaches. We are searching for a skilled leader in the security operations space to harness Microsoft's vast security signals, identify the latest adversary behaviors, generate critical alerts, build new hunting tools, and drive innovations in detecting advanced attacker techniques. 

People Management

• Managers deliver success through empowerment and accountability by modeling, coaching, and caring.
• Model - Live our culture; Embody our values; Practice our leadership principles.
• Coach - Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn.
• Care - Attract and retain great people; Know each individual’s capabilities and aspirations; Invest in the growth of others.

Collaboration

• Guides team to work with internal and external parties to deliver service levels to address classes of threats. Advocates requirements for solutions. Manages relationship with third party account management team.

Security Incident Response

• Guides team to research attempted or successful efforts to compromise systems security and aligns resources to pursue next steps. Manages stakeholder communication appropriately. Coordinates with partner teams as needed to secure data and chain of custody. Collaborates with other security teams to ensure comprehensiveness of analysis and response. Conducts postmortem analysis. Displays strong command and control presence to lead through extremely ambiguous challenging situations quickly and calmly.

Monitoring and Detection

• Guides team to develop prioritized detection capabilities. Manages internal stakeholder relationships appropriately to maintain awareness. Oversees team in detecting potential or actual intrusions. Ensures team is properly resourced to identify and mitigate intrusions. Drives improvements into first-party products. Leverages and contributes to others' work. Shares best practices and lessons learned across teams.

Threat Intelligence and Analysis

• Supports team in threat analysis and provides guidance on prioritization of analytical efforts. Guides teams and secures resources and partnerships as needed to address threats.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), and information technology (IT) operations
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of experience managing a security team.
• Experience in delivering managed threat hunting service (preferably for large customers).
• Experience in Security Operations, Threat Intelligence, Cyber Incident Response, or Penetration Testing/Red Teaming. Proficiency in using analysis tools and scripting languages (e.g., Python, SQL, Splunk, PowerBI).
• Knowledge of Windows OS internals and security mechanisms. Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and authentication/authorization protocols. Understanding of threat analysis models (e.g., Diamond Model, Cyber Kill Chain, MITRE ATT&CK).
• Fluent in reading, writing and speaking English.

Other Requirements

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, modeling, cyber security, and anomaly detection
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
• 2+ years people management.
• 1+ year(s) leading a security function (e.g., Security Operations Center [SOC], threat and vulnerabillity management [TVM]).
• 1+ year(s) leading multi-disciplinary team.
• CISSP, CISA, CISM, SANS, GCIA, GCIH, OSCP, and/or Security+ certifications.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.