Director - Security Engineering & Operations

Role Overview:

The Director of Security Engineering and Operations will lead a multi-disciplinary team that provides engineering development for key security platforms and solutions as well as operations teams.

Strategy & Leadership:

- Oversee security engineering teams that are delivering platforms and solutions that achieve the Security Strategy.

- Assist in the implementation and delivery of the SRE capabilities for Security Technology solutions, including roadmap, operating model, and success metrics.

- Lead and develop a team of Security SREs, drive hiring, coaching, performance management, and career growth.

- Establish a culture of blameless learning, automation, engineering rigor, and pragmatic risk management.

Reliability & Security Engineering Outcomes:

- Build security reliability capabilities such as secure service baselines, resilience engineering, recovery engineering, and security observability.

- Drive improvements to SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and operational maturity for mission-critical systems.

- Partner with teams to architect and implement controls that reduce risk without slowing delivery.

Incident Response, Resilience & Crisis Leadership:

- Establish a peer operational capability to the Johnston, RI Fusion Center.

- Drive operational collaboration across ETS teams to improve detection and response.

- Serve as an escalation leader for high-severity security and technology incidents.

- Refine and improve incident management practices including on-call, runbooks, playbooks, postmortems, and corrective action tracking.

- Ensure root causes are addressed through engineering fixes, not manual processes.

Platform, Automation & Tooling:

- Implement automation for repeatable reliability and security controls including CI/CD guardrails, secrets management, configuration integrity, and policy enforcement.

- Improve platform capabilities including service templates, golden paths, reliability patterns, and secure deployment standards.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance Enablement:

- Translate risk and compliance objectives into technical solutions and operational controls.

- Produce evidence and metrics needed for audits including SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, and FedRAMP.

- Establish executive-level reporting on reliability/security posture, incident trends, and risk reduction.

Required Qualifications:

- 10+ years in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, or security engineering roles, with 5+ years leading teams.

- Proven track record improving availability, latency, incident response, and operational maturity for large-scale systems.

- Strong understanding of modern security fundamentals including identity/access, secrets management, network security, and vulnerability management.

- Experience building scalable reliability practices including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, postmortems, on-call, and automation.

- Executive-level communication skills with the ability to translate technical risks into business impact.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience in regulated environments such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, or FedRAMP.

- Expertise with Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP), Containers (Kubernetes), IaC (Terraform), CI/CD tools, Observability platforms, and SIEM/SOAR.

- Background in detection engineering, incident command, or purple-team collaboration.

Core Competencies:

- Systems thinking and pragmatic risk management.

- Incident leadership under pressure.

- Strong engineering standards and automation-first mindset.

- Ability to influence across organizations without relying on authority.

- Ability to balance speed, reliability, and security.