Director – Security Operations Center (SOC) - UAE National

Overview

Responsibilities

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• Define and drive the overall SOC and cyber defense strategy aligned with organizational and MSSP business objectives.
• Lead the maturity improvement of SOC operations, incident response capabilities, threat intelligence integration, and security monitoring services.
• Develop long-term roadmaps for SOC technologies, automation, threat detection, and cyber resilience.
• Ensure alignment with industry frameworks and best practices such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, ISO 27001, and SOC standards.
• Provide strategic direction for proactive threat hunting, threat intelligence operationalization and cyber defense enhancements.
• Support executive management with strategic cybersecurity insights, risk visibility, and operational reporting.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to strengthen MSSP operational capabilities and customer service quality.
• Oversee 24x7 SOC operations across internal and customer environments.
• Lead incident response activities including containment, eradication, recovery, escalation handling, and post-incident reviews.
• Manage threat intelligence activities including IOC management, threat actor tracking, threat advisories, and intelligence integration into SOC operations.
• Ensure optimization and tuning of SIEM, SOAR, EDR/XDR, NDR, and related security platforms.
• Oversee threat hunting activities and advanced detection use case development.
• Develop and maintain SOC procedures, escalation matrices, playbooks, and operational frameworks.
• Coordinate with SOC Engineering, Security Architecture, and other teams to enhance operational effectiveness.
• Ensure SLA/KPI compliance for MSSP monitoring and security services.
• Monitor SOC operational performance and service delivery quality.
• Ensure proper alert management, triage, escalation, and incident handling processes are maintained.
• Conduct operational reviews and implement corrective actions where necessary.
• Ensure continuous monitoring coverage across customer and internal environments.
• Oversee cyber incident coordination with customers, vendors, and internal stakeholders.
• Manage operational readiness, shift coverage, escalation handling, and resource utilization.
• Support audits, compliance activities, customer reviews, and operational reporting requirements.
• Drive operational automation and efficiency improvements within the SOC environment.
• Job specific skills
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• Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity, Information Security, Computer Science, or related field.
• Minimum 10+ years of cybersecurity experience with at least 5 years in SOC leadership roles.
• Strong experience in MSSP or large-scale multi-tenant security operations environments.
• Proven experience managing SOC operations, cyber incidents, threat intelligence, and security monitoring functions.
• Strong understanding of modern cyber threats, attack methodologies, threat actors, and incident handling processes.
• Experience managing enterprise and cloud security monitoring environments.
• Strong leadership, communication, stakeholder management, and decision-making skills.