Senior Incident Response Lead – Crisis Command

Cognizant; Frankfort (KY); Remote; USD 135,000 - 145,000; Full time

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking an Incident Response Senior Manager to lead and coordinate end-to-end cybersecurity incident response efforts across multiple teams, ensuring swift containment and clear executive communications.

You will act as incident commander, guiding cross-functional response efforts, including SOC, forensics, DLP, cloud security, legal, and client accounts, while maintaining high standards of quality and learning.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in incident management, cybersecurity operations, or a related discipline.
• At least 3 years of experience in a leadership or incident response lead capacity.
• Proven ability to independently assume incident command responsibilities during critical and high-severity incidents.
• Strong experience coordinating cross-functional response teams across multiple cybersecurity disciplines.
• Expertise in Cyber Security operations, incident response methodologies, escalation management, and crisis communication.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to communicate effectively with technical and executive audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to exercise sound judgment and make decisions under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Assume the Incident Commander role without prompting, immediately triaging incident severity, assembling response teams, and initiating appropriate workflows and standard operating procedures.
• Make autonomous real-time containment, escalation, and communication decisions during high-severity incidents, including situations with incomplete information.
• Own end-to-end response activities for cybersecurity incidents, coordinating across SOC, forensics, DLP, cloud security, legal, compliance, and client account teams.
• Orchestrate multi-domain security functions including SIEM, investigations, forensics, cloud controls, security architecture, policy, and data protection to ensure aligned and timely response activities.
• Lead all incident communications including war room updates, executive briefings, stakeholder communications, and client-facing notifications with clarity and confidence.

Skills

Incident management

Cybersecurity operations

Leadership

Cross-functional coordination

Crisis communication

Executive communication

Decision making

Job description

Cognizant is seeking an Incident Response Senior Manager to lead and coordinate end-to-end cybersecurity incident response efforts across multiple teams, ensuring swift containment and clear executive communications.

You will act as incident commander, guiding cross-functional response efforts, including SOC, forensics, DLP, cloud security, legal, and client accounts, while maintaining high standards of quality and learning.