Manager, Incident Response

Role Summary

Sophos is seeking an experienced and motivated Incident Response Manager to lead the Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) supporting its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) customers. The successful candidate will be responsible for the people leadership and operational management of the CIRT, ensuring consistent, high-quality execution across active cyber security incidents and customer engagements.

As an Incident Response Manager, you will lead and develop squads of analysts across CIRT while remaining technically engaged as a senior escalation point for complex and high-severity incidents. You will balance people leadership with incident response operations, including operational readiness, incident command, customer communication, and continuous improvement, to build a resilient, scalable, and customer-focused CIRT capability.

What you will do

• Lead and develop squads of analysts across CIRT; set clear expectations, provide coaching and feedback, support career development, and build an inclusive, high-performing team culture.
• Own day-to-day CIRT operations across multiple squads, ensuring appropriate staffing, coverage, workload balancing, prioritization, and service-level performance for concurrent customer engagements.
• Provide senior technical leadership and act as Incident Commander for complex or high-severity engagements, coordinating investigation, containment, eradication, recovery, and customer communications through to resolution.
• Establish and maintain operational and investigative quality standards, ensuring teams follow approved processes and playbooks and that engagement documentation, case reviews, and post-incident actions are complete and accurate.
• Use engagement, quality, response-time, capacity, and customer-outcome metrics to identify trends, manage performance, inform resource planning, and drive measurable improvements across the function.
• Build operational readiness by maintaining skills coverage, onboarding and training plans, incident exercises, tooling needs, and playbook updates for a fast-changing threat landscape.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for customer concerns, material findings, delivery risks, and resource conflicts, translating complex technical issues into clear updates and actionable decisions for technical and executive stakeholders.
• Partner cross-functionally with Threat Intelligence, the Security Operations Center, Detection Engineering, Product, and other teams to close detection and response gaps and strengthen MDR’s overall response capability.
• Drive continuous improvement and standardization by turning incident lessons, analyst feedback, and operational data into improved workflows, automation opportunities, training, and service enhancements.

What will you bring

Essential:

• 7+ years of experience in cybersecurity operations, incident response, digital forensics, or a related discipline, including at least 2 years leading people, teams, or operational functions.
• Demonstrated experience managing incident response operations across multiple concurrent engagements, with responsibility for staffing, prioritization, service-level expectations, and customer outcomes.
• Strong technical background in endpoint, network, and cloud security, with proven ability to investigate indicators of compromise, determine scope and root cause, and direct containment, eradication, and remediation efforts.
• Experience serving as an Incident Commander or senior technical escalation point during high-pressure incidents, with the judgment to make timely risk-based decisions and communicate clearly with technical and executive stakeholders.
• Proven people-leadership experience, including coaching, performance management, career development, hiring or onboarding, and building effective teams through constructive feedback and accountability.
• Experience using operational metrics, quality reviews, and customer feedback to identify performance or process gaps and deliver practical improvements in a security operations or managed services environment.
• Deep understanding of attacker tools, tactics, and procedures, including persistence, lateral movement, credential theft, ransomware, and defense evasion; working knowledge of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, strong analytical and troubleshooting ability, and a degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field; or relevant, commensurate work experience.

Desired:

• Advanced cybersecurity certifications preferred (e.g., GCFE, GCFA, GCIH, CISSP, or similar).
• Experience leading distributed, global, or 24x7 incident response or security operations teams, including participation in an on-call or leadership escalation rotation.
• Experience with SIEM, EDR, forensic collection, and threat intelligence platforms, together with practical use of OSQuery, SQL, PowerShell, KQL, CyLR, Velociraptor, or comparable tools.
• Experience developing incident response playbooks, training programs, tabletop exercises, or other readiness and capability-building initiatives.
• Natural curiosity, adaptability, and a passion for continuous learning, service improvement, and developing the next generation of incident response professionals.