Security Analyst II​/III

Joining the team at Gaston County Government means being part of a community that is dedicated to improving the lives of its citizens. We are a dynamic organization that values innovation, collaboration, and commitment to service.

As an employee of Gaston County, you will have the opportunity to make a difference in your community every day. Whether you are working in public safety, social services, or administration, your contributions will help improve the lives of our residents and build a better future for our county.

Provide secure, innovative, and efficient technology that enhances collaboration and empowers County departments to deliver outstanding public service.

The anticipated hiring range for the Security Analyst II is $33.80 - $40.14

The anticipated hiring range for the Security Analyst III is $37.50 - $44.53

The duties listed below are not all of the duties that may be assigned but are those that are considered as essential for an employee to perform.

• Alert and Incident Response:
  Monitor, investigate, and respond to cybersecurity alerts and incidents across endpoint, network, identity, email, cloud, and server environments. Analyze alerts from SIEM, EDR, firewalls, Microsoft 365/Entra , email security, and other security platforms to determine scope, severity, and potential business impact. Investigate indicators of compromise, suspicious authentication activity, malware, unauthorized access, and other anomalous behavior. Perform root cause analysis and coordinate containment, eradication, remediation, and recovery activities with other IT teams and County departments.
  
  Document incidents, investigative findings, actions taken, and lessons learned. Assist with tuning detections, reducing false positives, improving monitoring capabilities, and developing incident response procedures and playbooks.
• Security Engineering and Hygiene (M365/Entra, Firewalls, Endpoint):
  Implement, maintain, evaluate, and improve technical security controls across Microsoft 365, Entra , Active Directory, Windows Server, endpoint security, firewalls, networking, cloud services, and related security platforms. Review configurations, authentication and access controls, endpoint protections, firewall policies, security baselines, and system exposure to identify and remediate security weaknesses. Support identity protection, privileged access, MFA, conditional access, endpoint detection and response, network security, and other preventative security controls.
  
  Perform cybersecurity reviews of proposed software, hardware, cloud services and technology purchases and provide risk-based recommendations. Participate in vendor security assessments and third-party risk reviews. Assist with security architecture, disaster recovery, backup validation, and business continuity activities, including consideration of RPO/RTO and cyber recovery requirements.
• Vulnerability Management:
  
  Perform ongoing identification, analysis, prioritization, tracking, remediation, validation, and reporting of vulnerabilities affecting County technology assets. Review vulnerability scan results and security advisories and analyze CVEs, CVSS scores, exploit availability, known exploitation, asset exposure, system criticality, and potential organizational impact to determine remediation priority. Work with infrastructure, networking, application, and support teams to coordinate patching, configuration changes, upgrades, compensating controls, or other remediation activities.
  
  Validate remediation and identify recurring or systemic security weaknesses. Maintain vulnerability documentation and metrics, communicate significant risks to appropriate technical and management personnel, and support continuous improvement…