Senior SOC Director - Lead Security Ops & Student Programs

Cyber 429; Kansas; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Cyber 429 in the Kansas City area is seeking a Director of Security Operations to own and scale our SOCs, lead a small senior team, and drive incident response for clients and student programs.

You will tune detections, own data pipelines, and mentor the next generation of defenders, balancing hands-on work with strategic leadership.

This role emphasizes teaching, strong automation skills, and the ability to operate across commercial and educational initiatives.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years in security operations or incident response.
• At least 2 years leading or mentoring analysts.
• Hands-on today with incident handling and detections tuning.
• Direct experience owning incidents end to end.
• Experience with SIEM and an EDR platform, especially Defender & Sentinel.
• Scripting or automation ability (Python/PowerShell/SOAR).
• Clear written and verbal communication with clients.
• US work eligibility; security clearance if needed.

Responsibilities

• Own the 429 SOC end to end, including runbooks and coverage.
• Lead the student SOC and mentor learners.
• Run incident response when events occur; develop IR playbooks.
• Own data pipelines, logging, normalization, and SIEM/EDR integration.
• Balance training with client-facing responsibilities.
• Define standards and ensure on-call performance.

Skills

Incident response

Detection engineering

Mentoring analysts

Scripting automation

Communication skills

SOC leadership

Owner mindset

Tools

SIEM

EDR

Microsoft Defender

Microsoft Sentinel

Job description

Cyber 429 in the Kansas City area is seeking a Director of Security Operations to own and scale our SOCs, lead a small senior team, and drive incident response for clients and student programs.

You will tune detections, own data pipelines, and mentor the next generation of defenders, balancing hands-on work with strategic leadership.

This role emphasizes teaching, strong automation skills, and the ability to operate across commercial and educational initiatives.