Security Operations Lead

Vitol is an energy and commodities company with revenues of $331 billion in 2024; its primary business is the trading and distribution of energy products globally – it trades over seven million barrels per day of crude oil and products and, at any time, has 250 ships transporting its cargoes.

Vitol’s clients include national oil companies, multinationals, leading industrial companies and utilities. Founded in Rotterdam in 1966, today Vitol serves clients from some 40 offices worldwide and is invested in energy assets globally including 24mM3 of storage, 850kbpd of refining capacity, and 10,000 service stations. To date, we have committed over $2.5 billion of capital to renewable projects and are identifying and developing low-carbon opportunities around the world.

We are seeking an experienced Security Operations Lead to build, manage, and continuously improve our internal Security Operations Centre (SOC). Based in Geneva or London, this role combines hands‑on cyber defense with team leadership across three global offices (Singapore, London, and Houston). The ideal candidate is a technically proficient cybersecurity professional who can operate as both a senior incident handler (L2/L3) and a people leader shaping our detection and response capabilities.

• Lead a team of 4 SOC analysts/engineers distributed across Singapore, London, and Houston, ensuring 24/7 coverage alignment and consistent service quality.
• Define and enforce SOC operating procedures, escalation paths, shift handover protocols, and performance metrics (MTTD, MTTR, false-positive rate).
• Report on SOC performance, threat landscape trends, and risk posture to the CISO and senior stakeholders.
• Manage the external SOC relationship — act as the primary interface with the outsourced SOC provider, govern service performance, drive continuous improvement, and ensure alignment with internal security objectives.

• Own the detection engineering lifecycle: develop, tune, and maintain analytics rules, correlation logic, and custom detections in Microsoft Sentinel (KQL) and across the broader security stack.
• Continuously improve detection coverage mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, reducing blind spots and noise.
• Evaluate and integrate threat intelligence feeds to enrich alerts and drive proactive hunting.

• Act as a senior incident responder (L2/L3), leading triage, investigation, containment, eradication, and recovery for complex security incidents.
• Coordinate cross-functional incident response with IT, Legal, Compliance, and business units.
• Conduct post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis; translate findings into detection improvements and process updates.

• Author, maintain, and test SOC playbooks and runbooks covering the full incident lifecycle (phishing, malware, insider threat, cloud compromise, ransomware, BEC, data exfiltration, etc.).
• Improve existing playbooks and create new ones based on emerging threats, red team findings, and lessons learned.
• Drive tabletop exercises and purple-team simulations to validate playbook effectiveness.
• Partner with the internal Red Team to translate adversary emulation results into actionable detection rules and response procedures.
• Participate in purple-team exercises, validating detection coverage and tuning alerts based on simulated attack paths.

• Mentor and develop SOC team members through structured training plans, knowledge-sharing sessions, and hands‑on coaching.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and professional growth across the distributed team.

• 4+ years of progressive experience in…