Senior Cyber Defense Lead (Hybrid)

Selective Insurance; Hartford (CT); On-site; USD 130,000 - 176,000; Full time

Job summary

Selective Insurance's ITS Cyber Defense team seeks a Senior Specialist to strengthen our cyber defenses across SOC, incident response, and security engineering. The role leads complex initiatives and drives advanced threat detection and response, serving as a trusted technical resource across IT, business units, and external partners.

You will identify security gaps with IT teams, define requirements, recommend solutions, and clearly communicate risks and status to technical and business

Qualifications

• 7+ years in information technology, information security, or risk-related roles.
• 5+ years in security operations, incident response, cyber defense, or related security disciplines.
• Experience independently managing complex technical work, coordinating across teams, and driving security initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Serves as a senior subject matter expert and escalation point for Cyber Defense, providing technical leadership and mentorship to team members.
• Monitors, analyzes, investigates, and responds to security alerts and events across endpoint, network, identity, email, and cloud environments using enterprise security tools.
• Performs alert triage and case management, including validating events, distinguishing false positives from true threats, documenting findings, assessing impact, and escalating in accordance with established procedures.
• Supports and leads incident response activities, including scoping, evidence review, forensic support, documentation, containment actions, and escalation into formal incident response processes.
• Administers and improves Cyber Defense technologies such as EDR, SIEM, NAC, vulnerability management tools, and other monitoring and control platforms, including tuning, troubleshooting, upgrades, and optimization.
• Leads detection and response improvements by tuning alerts, reducing false positives, identifying visibility gaps, and implementing enhancements to tools, processes, and workflows.
• Independently manages technical and operational improvement initiatives, including tool enhancements, process optimization, and reporting improvements, while communicating progress to stakeholders.
• Partners with internal teams and external vendors to support troubleshooting, remediation, tool effectiveness, and implementation of Cyber Defense capabilities.
• Contributes to the development and enhancement of Cyber Defense policies, standards, procedures, and compliance alignment with regulatory and audit requirements.
• Participates in the IT Security on-call rotation and responds to high-priority events and incidents as required.

Skills

Security operations

Incident response

Detection engineering

Cybersecurity

Technical leadership

Cross-team coordination

NIST CSF

Regulatory frameworks

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT/Cybersecurity/CS

CISSP

GIAC

GCIH

GCIA

GCFA

Tools

EDR

SIEM

NAC

Vulnerability mgmt

Job description

Selective Insurance's ITS Cyber Defense team seeks a Senior Specialist to strengthen our cyber defenses across SOC, incident response, and security engineering. The role leads complex initiatives and drives advanced threat detection and response, serving as a trusted technical resource across IT, business units, and external partners.

You will identify security gaps with IT teams, define requirements, recommend solutions, and clearly communicate risks and status to technical and business