Senior Security Engineer

Akkodis is seeking a Sr. Security Operations Engineer for one of our clients in Charlotte, NC.

Rate Range: $65.00 to $73.00/hour; the rate may be negotiable based on experience, education, geographic location, and other factors.

The Senior Security Operations Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for protecting personnel, enterprise systems, cloud environments, applications, engineering platforms, and business operations. This position serves as a senior escalation resource for security monitoring and incident response while helping mature security operations capabilities, processes, and technologies.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong communication skills, investigative rigor, and a proactive approach to improving threat detection, response, automation, and operational effectiveness.

This role is onsite daily.

• Lead complex security investigations from initial alert validation through containment, eradication, recovery, documentation, and lessons learned.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for security alerts across endpoint, identity, email, cloud, SaaS, and network environments.
• Partner with managed detection and response providers to ensure effective monitoring, triage, escalation, documentation, and incident handoff.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to critical security incidents outside normal business hours as needed.
• Develop, tune, test, and maintain detection rules, threat-hunting queries, dashboards, watchlists, automation workflows, and investigation content using Kusto Query Language (KQL).
• Build and enhance security orchestration and automation processes that improve investigation efficiency and accelerate response activities.
• Conduct proactive threat hunting using threat intelligence, indicators of compromise, attacker behaviors, and security telemetry.
• Administer and optimize Microsoft security technologies, including Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR, Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, Defender for Identity, and Microsoft Entra  capabilities.
• Investigate and coordinate response activities across security tools such as Zscaler, Abnormal Security, Wiz, Pager Duty, Jira, Fresh service, and related security platforms.
• Create and maintain incident response playbooks, investigation procedures, escalation processes, and operational documentation.
• Collect, preserve, and analyze digital evidence while supporting endpoint and cloud forensic investigations.
• Collaborate with IT Operations, IAM, Cloud Engineering, Dev Sec Ops , GRC, Legal, Privacy, HR, Physical Security, Communications, and business stakeholders during incidents and security initiatives.
• Support vulnerability and zero-day response efforts by assessing exposure, coordinating remediation, tracking risk, and communicating status updates.
• Correlate exposure and cloud security findings with asset context, active threats, and business impact to drive remediation priorities.
• Prepare incident reports, executive summaries, operational metrics, and post-incident reviews for technical and leadership audiences.
• Mentor analysts and team members while promoting best practices and technical excellence across security operations.
• Continuously improve detections, controls, playbooks, automation, logging, and response readiness based on lessons learned.
• Participate in tabletop exercises, purple-team engagements, detection validation, and other security readiness activities.

• 5+ years of experience in security operations, incident response, threat detection, digital forensics, security engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven ability to lead complex technical investigations and make effective decisions in dynamic environments.
• Hands-on experience with modern SIEM and EDR/XDR platforms, with strong expertise in Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender preferred.
• Proficiency with KQL or comparable query languages for detection engineering, threat hunting, log analysis, and dashboard development.
• Experience investigating identity, endpoint, email, cloud, SaaS, and network security events, including phishing, account compromise, malware, ransomware, insider threats, data loss, and third-party risks.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Entra , Microsoft 365 security, Azure, and AWS security services.
• Experience with incident and case management platforms such as Pager Duty, Jira, Fresh service, Teams, and Confluence.
• Understanding of security automation, orchestration, APIs,…