Director - Security Engineering and Operations
First seen by Alion on Oct 15, 2026.
Role Overview:
The Director of Security Engineering and Operations will lead a multi-disciplinary team that provides engineering development for key security platforms and solutions as well as operations teams.
Strategy & Leadership:
- Oversee security engineering teams that are delivering platforms and solutions that achieve the Security Strategy.
- Assist in the implementation and delivery of the SRE capabilities for Security Technology solutions, including roadmap, operating model, and success metrics.
- Lead and develop a team of Security SREs, drive hiring, coaching, performance management, and career growth.
- Establish a culture of blameless learning, automation, engineering rigor, and pragmatic risk management.
Reliability & Security Engineering Outcomes:
- Build security reliability capabilities such as secure service baselines, resilience engineering, recovery engineering, and security observability.
- Drive improvements to SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and operational maturity for mission-critical systems.
- Partner with teams to architect and implement controls that reduce risk without slowing delivery.
Incident Response, Resilience & Crisis Leadership:
- Establish a peer operational capability to the Johnston, RI Fusion Center.
- Drive operational collaboration across ETS teams to improve detection and response.
- Serve as an escalation leader for high-severity security and technology incidents.
- Refine and improve incident management practices including on-call, runbooks, playbooks, postmortems, and corrective action tracking.
- Ensure root causes are addressed through engineering fixes, not manual processes.
Platform, Automation & Tooling:
- Implement automation for repeatable reliability and security controls including CI/CD guardrails, secrets management, configuration integrity, and policy enforcement.
- Improve platform capabilities including service templates, golden paths, reliability patterns, and secure deployment standards.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance Enablement:
- Translate risk and compliance objectives into technical solutions and operational controls.
- Produce evidence and metrics needed for audits including SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, and FedRAMP.
- Establish executive-level reporting on reliability/security posture, incident trends, and risk reduction.
Required Qualifications:
- 10+ years in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, or security engineering roles, with 5+ years leading teams.
- Proven track record improving availability, latency, incident response, and operational maturity for large-scale systems.
- Strong understanding of modern security fundamentals including identity/access, secrets management, network security, and vulnerability management.
- Experience building scalable reliability practices including SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, postmortems, on-call, and automation.
- Executive-level communication skills with the ability to translate technical risks into business impact.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in regulated environments such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, or FedRAMP.
- Expertise with Cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP), Containers (Kubernetes), IaC (Terraform), CI/CD tools, Observability platforms, and SIEM/SOAR.
- Background in detection engineering, incident command, or purple-team collaboration.
Core Competencies:
- Systems thinking and pragmatic risk management.
- Incident leadership under pressure.
- Strong engineering standards and automation-first mindset.
- Ability to influence across organizations without relying on authority.
- Ability to balance speed, reliability, and security.
Skills
Information Security, Cyber Security, IT Operations, IT Risk Management, IT Governance, IT Infrastructure, IT Compliance