Director - Security Engineering & Operations
First seen by Alion on Oct 15, 2026.
Experience : 10+ Years
Leadership Experience : 5+ Years
Mandatory Experience : 11+ years in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), 11+ years in Application Security Architecture, and 10+ years in Containerization
About the Role :
We are looking for an experienced Director of Security Engineering and Operations to lead multidisciplinary teams responsible for security engineering, platform reliability, automation, and security operations.
The ideal candidate will combine strong technical expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Application Security Architecture, and containerized environments with proven leadership capabilities.
The role will focus on building secure, resilient, and scalable platforms, improving operational maturity, strengthening incident response, and integrating security controls into engineering and delivery processes.
Key Responsibilities :
Security Engineering & Technical Leadership :
- Lead security engineering teams responsible for designing, developing, and operating enterprise security platforms and solutions.
- Translate security strategy into technical roadmaps, engineering initiatives, and measurable outcomes.
- Establish secure engineering standards, security guardrails, policy-as-code, hardened configurations, and secure-by-default practices.
- Partner with architecture, infrastructure, application development, and security teams to implement effective controls without compromising delivery speed.
- Drive continuous improvement in engineering quality, automation, and operational performance.
Site Reliability Engineering & Platform Resilience :
- Define and implement SRE practices for mission-critical security technology platforms.
- Establish and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), error budgets, availability, latency, and reliability metrics.
- Lead resilience engineering initiatives, including fault tolerance, graceful degradation, chaos testing, backup validation, disaster recovery, and automated restoration.
- Improve system observability through actionable telemetry, monitoring, alerting, and detection engineering.
- Build reusable platform capabilities, standardised service templates, golden paths, and secure deployment patterns.
Application Security Architecture & Automation :
- Integrate security requirements throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
- Drive secure architecture practices, threat modelling, vulnerability management, identity and access controls, secrets management, and network security.
- Implement automated security controls across CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment.
- Promote Infrastructure as Code (IaC), policy enforcement, automated remediation, and safe rollout strategies.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to identify and address architectural security risks.
Incident Response & Security Operations :
- Lead response and escalation for high-severity security and technology incidents.
- Strengthen incident management processes, on-call operations, runbooks, playbooks, post-incident reviews, and corrective action tracking.
- Improve collaboration between security operations, engineering, and detection and response teams.
- Ensure recurring incidents are addressed through permanent engineering fixes and automation rather than manual workarounds.
- Drive a blameless learning culture focused on root-cause analysis and continuous improvement.
Governance, Risk & Compliance :
- Translate business risk and compliance requirements into technical controls and operational processes.
- Support audit readiness and evidence generation for applicable frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and FedRAMP.
- Develop executive-level reporting on security posture, platform reliability, incident trends, and risk reduction.
- Balance security, resilience, operational efficiency, and business delivery priorities.
People & Stakeholder Management :
- Lead, mentor, and develop Security Engineering and SRE teams.
- Drive hiring, performance management, technical capability development, and career progression.
- Collaborate with senior stakeholders across security, technology, infrastructure, and business functions.
- Communicate technical risks, reliability challenges, and remediation priorities in terms of business impact.
Mandatory Skills & Experience :
- 10+ years of experience in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, or security engineering, with 5+ years in team leadership.
- 11+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).
- 11+ years of experience in Application Security Architecture.
- 10+ years of hands-on experience with Containerization technologies.
- Proven track record of improving system availability, latency, incident response, and operational maturity in large-scale environments.
- Strong understanding of application security, secure SDLC, threat modelling, vulnerability management, identity and access management, secrets management, and network security.
- Hands-on knowledge of SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, observability, incident management, postmortems, and reliability automation.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical teams, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and communicate complex technical risks to executive leadership.
Preferred Technical Skills :
- Cloud Platforms : AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Containerization & Orchestration : Docker, Kubernetes, and service mesh technologies.
- Infrastructure as Code : Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Azure Bicep.
- CI/CD : GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI/CD, or Jenkins.
- Observability : Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or OpenTelemetry.
- Security Operations : SIEM/SOAR platforms such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Chronicle, or Cortex XSOAR.
- Experience in detection engineering, incident command, purple-team collaboration, and internal developer platforms.
- Exposure to regulated environments and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, or FedRAMP.
Core Competencies :
- Strategic and systems thinking
- Strong technical and people leadership
- Security-first and automation-first engineering mindset
- Incident leadership and decision-making under pressure
- Pragmatic risk management
- Cross-functional stakeholder influence
- Ability to balance security, scalability, reliability, and engineering velocity
Preferred Candidate Profile :
A senior engineering leader with deep expertise in SRE, application security architecture, and containerized platforms, capable of driving enterprise security strategy while ensuring the reliability, resilience, and scalability of critical technology systems
Skills
Security, Site Reliability, Security Operations Center, Applications Security, Vulnerability Management, IT Governance, IT Compliance, Threat Modeling, SIEM, SOAR