Director, Security Engineering & Operations

About Payscale

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Job Summary

The Director, Security Engineering & Operations directs, manages, and leads Payscale’s

Security Engineering and Eecurity Operations functions. This is a hands-on leadership role:

the Director sets strategy and manages the team while remaining directly engaged in

architecture, tooling, automation, and incident command. Responsibilities span the design

and hardening of security controls, threat detection and incident response, vulnerability

and exposure management, endpoint and identity protection, and security automation

across Payscale’s corporate, cloud, and hosting environments. The Director owns

Payscale’s MDR relationship and is accountable for the maturity, performance, and

roadmap of both functions.

This role reports to the CISO, VP
- Cybersecurity & Enterprise Technology.

What You'll Do

Leadership & People Management

• Direct, manage, and lead the security engineering and security operations team

  members; own hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and career development

  plans aligned to Payscale’s Information Security Career Ladder

• Set strategy and quarterly/annual objectives for both functions and translate them

  into a prioritized, measurable roadmap; hold regular 1:1s and team connects to

  maintain a high-performance, feedback-rich culture

• Mentor engineers and analysts at all career levels, providing task-based directives,

  technical coaching, and growth-oriented feedback

• Own the on-call rotation and after-hours escalation path across both functions,

  ensuring coverage for time-sensitive detection and response

• Serve as a working leader — remaining hands-on in engineering, architecture, and

  incident response rather than leading solely through delegation

  Security Engineering

• Own the design, implementation, and continuous hardening of security controls

  across corporate, cloud, and hosting environments

• Build and maintain security automation and integrations — SOAR, detection-as-

  code, and infrastructure-as-code guardrails — to scale coverage without adding

  headcount

• Engineer and operate the security tooling stack (EDR/XDR, SIEM, identity

  protection, DLP/CASB, vulnerability scanning), ensuring platforms are well-

  integrated and meet architectural standards

• Partner with Engineering and Infrastructure to embed “secure by design” into

  CI/CD, cloud architecture, and product development

• Drive adoption of a zero-trust methodology across identity, endpoint, network, and

  application layers

• Lead security engineering for enterprise AI and agentic tooling adoption, building

  controls and guardrails for safe internal use

  Security Operations & Incident Response

• Drive the threat detection and incident response capability: detection engineering,

  playbook development, tabletop exercises, and continuous improvement of

  MTTA/MTTR metrics

• Lead or oversee incident response events as the designated incident manager for

  significant or multi-team incidents, running incident command end-to-end

• Own the MDR relationship, holding the provider accountable to SLAs, coverage,

  and response outcomes

• Extend detection and response to secure enterprise AI and agentic tooling

  adoption

  Vulnerability & Exposure Management

• Own the vulnerability and exposure management function across all corporate and

  hosting environments, coordinating cross-functionally on mitigation and

  remediation with clear SLAs

• Expand security monitoring, visibility, and coverage using existing platforms and

  open-source tooling

  Program, Metrics & Stakeholder Engagement

• Own the security engineering and operations portion of the Information Security

  program roadmap, delivering operational metrics, risk-posture data, and…