Senior Cyber Defense Architect – Remote Contract

mercor; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 124,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor seeks a Cybersecurity Expert for a remote contract role. You will design and execute cybersecurity scenarios across detection, response, forensics, vulnerability management, and security architecture, working with SIEM/EDR/GRC tools.

You will align with US and international standards (NIST CSF, SOC 2, ISO 27001) and produce reference reports and compliance documents. Ideal candidates have 5+ years in security leadership or engineering, direct IR program ownership, and strong tooling

Qualifications

• 5+ years working as a security engineer or CISO at a major company or security firm (Mandiant, CrowdStrike, or in-house leadership).
• Direct ownership of incident response programs, security architecture, or compliance initiatives.
• Fluency in security tooling and understanding of regulatory frameworks and current threat landscape.

Responsibilities

• Construct cybersecurity scenarios spanning security operations center monitoring, incident response and forensics, vulnerability management, and security architecture design.
• Build tasks across security operations and threat detection, incident response and digital forensics, vulnerability and penetration testing, security architecture and engineering, and governance/risk/compliance.
• Develop scenarios involving tools such as SIEM platforms (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel), EDR tools (CrowdStrike), vulnerability scanners (Tenable, Qualys), and GRC platforms used at major enterprises.
• Apply cybersecurity methodologies (threat modeling, incident response playbooks, risk assessment) to standards (NIST CSF, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIS2) and produce reference incident reports, security assessments, architecture designs, and compliance documentation.
• Author rubrics that distinguish authentic security judgment from generic textbook or certification-exam-level recall.

Skills

5+ years security experience

Incident response ownership

Security tooling fluency

Education

CISSP/CISM credential (preferred)

Job description

Mercor seeks a Cybersecurity Expert for a remote contract role. You will design and execute cybersecurity scenarios across detection, response, forensics, vulnerability management, and security architecture, working with SIEM/EDR/GRC tools.

You will align with US and international standards (NIST CSF, SOC 2, ISO 27001) and produce reference reports and compliance documents. Ideal candidates have 5+ years in security leadership or engineering, direct IR program ownership, and strong tooling