Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. KLDiscovery is a company that brings clarity, trust, and meaning to data for clients navigating legal matters worldwide. The Director, Cybersecurity Operations leads security operations, incident response, security engineering, vulnerability management, and threat intelligence while modernizing cybersecurity through MDR deployment, AI-informed detection, and automation. The role also partners with the CISO and Cyber GRC leadership to strengthen security posture, reporting, and team development.
Responsibilities
- Own the MDR relationship, including SLA management, escalation accountability, detection tuning, and quarterly threat hunt reviews
- Lead the incident response function: IR runbooks, major incident coordination, executive communication during active incidents, and post-incident root cause analysis
- Oversee SOC detection engineering, ensuring SIEM rules, SOAR playbooks, and automated response actions are maintained, tested, and tuned to the current threat landscape
- Direct and develop the security analyst pool, redeploying analyst capacity from frontline triage toward MDR validation, threat hunt support, and stakeholder reporting
- Oversee four specialized engineering lanes [endpoint, identity, cloud, and application security], ensuring each lane has clear ownership, defined scope, and measurable outcomes
- Drive security architecture reviews and engineering decisions for large or complex IT projects, ensuring security requirements are built in rather than bolted on
- Shape the security tooling stack strategy, evaluating, selecting, and retiring tools across endpoint, identity, cloud, and application security
- Enforce automation-first engineering practices, including IaC security gates, CI/CD pipeline security, CSPM auto-remediation, and SOAR-driven response workflows
- Lead the operationalization of threat intelligence, translating MDR findings and external threat data into detection rule updates, architecture decisions, and risk register inputs for the GRC team
- Own the vulnerability management lifecycle: scanning coverage, risk-based prioritization, remediation tracking, and SLA enforcement
- Own the purple team and control validation program, confirming that deployed controls operate as intended and that detection capabilities fire correctly against known attack techniques
- Drive threat modeling across the engineering function, identifying attack paths before they are exploited and feeding findings into remediation prioritization
- Oversee the AppSec function: secure SDLC, code review gates, SAST/DAST tooling, and security collaboration with the Product and Engineering teams
- Own cloud security posture management: CSPM, cloud workload protection, cloud IAM governance, and cloud-native security architecture
- Set the team-wide AI security posture, overseeing AI security controls across all engineering lanes, including model security, prompt injection testing, and AI tool access governance in partnership with cyber leadership
- Lead the ongoing maturation of the MDR deployment, expanding coverage, improving response fidelity, and integrating MDR outputs with internal SIEM, IAM, and compliance evidence workflows
- Champion security automation across the team, reducing manual toil in detection, response, vulnerability tracking, and reporting through SOAR, scripting, and platform integrations
- Evaluate emerging security technologies and make build/buy/partner recommendations to the CISO with clear business and risk rationale
- Lead, develop, and performance-manage a lean engineering team
- Partner with the Director, Cyber GRC as one unified cyber function, feeding operational threat intelligence into the risk register, supporting compliance evidence for technical controls, and jointly presenting security posture
- Provide regular metrics and reporting to the CISO on incident trends, control coverage, MDR performance, vulnerability posture, and team development
- Build a team culture of continuous improvement, automation-first execution, and proactive security, where threat hunting and control validation are protected activities rather than aspirational ones
Skills
- 15+ years of progressive experience in information security, including at least 7 years in a security leadership role
- Demonstrated ownership of a security operations or engineering function at the Director or equivalent level
- Experience operating and maturing an MDR deployment (CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, Arctic Wolf, Expel, or equivalent) in a corporate environment
- Hands-on background in at least two of the following: security engineering, penetration testing/offensive security, cloud security, application security, or incident response; this is not a purely strategic role
- Demonstrated experience deploying or maturing security automation, such as SOAR playbooks, detection engineering, IaC security, or CI/CD pipeline security
- Familiarity with cloud-native security (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including CSPM, cloud IAM, and workload protection
- Working knowledge of cybersecurity frameworks such as NIST SP 800-171, ISO 27001, and SOC 2
- Understanding of the vulnerability management lifecycle: scanning, prioritization, remediation tracking, and SLA enforcement
- Familiarity with AppSec disciplines: SAST/DAST tooling, secure SDLC, and security gate integration into CI/CD
- Understanding of IAM security governance (PAM, access review programs, and SSO/MFA architecture) as distinct from IT provisioning execution
- Experience with AI security considerations (model testing, prompt injection, AI tool access governance, and emerging AI governance frameworks such as the NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001) is a meaningful differentiator
- Foundational awareness of CMMC requirements
- An exceptional communicator, able to translate complex cyber risk and compliance concepts into clear business language for executives, clients, and regulators alike
- A natural collaborator and client-facing presence, comfortable leading enterprise client security discussions, representing KLDiscovery in due diligence meetings, and building trust with external stakeholders
- Business-minded, balancing security requirements against commercial realities and making practical decisions without sacrificing rigor
- A continuous learner with genuine curiosity, energized by a fast-growing company and a rapidly evolving regulatory and threat landscape
- Discreet and trusted, exercising sound judgment, maintaining confidentiality, and operating with professionalism
- Bachelor's degree in Information Security, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field required
- Professional certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CISA, GPEN, GCIA, or other GIAC certifications strongly preferred
- Master's degree or MBA with a security focus preferred
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