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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Own the security engineering and operations portion of the Information Security program roadmap, delivering operational metrics, risk‑posture data, and capacity analysis.
• Establish and report security KPIs to technology and executive leadership on a regular cadence.
• Collaborate…