Senior Cybersecurity Engineer – Vulnerability Management & SIEM

XCEL Engineering, Inc. is an award-winning small business that provides trusted information technology, engineering, consulting and project management solutions and services to federal agencies and organizations. Originally founded in 1971 by professional engineers at the University of Tennessee, XCEL was acquired in 2003 by U.S. Army and Navy veterans and in 2023 became a Martin Fed company.

XCEL Engineering is a part of IT Lab Partners (ITLP) which was created to support a leading research facility in the East Tennessee region in recruiting the best and the brightest technical talent. Considering joining our impressive team today!

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Cybersecurity Engineer - Vulnerability & Security Monitoring to support enterprise cybersecurity operations across complex, mission-critical computing environments. This position is responsible for administering, maintaining, and enhancing enterprise vulnerability management, security monitoring, and event logging capabilities to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information systems.

The ideal candidate will bring extensive hands-on experience with Tenable Security Center, enterprise SIEM platforms, vulnerability assessment, log management, and security automation, along with a strong understanding of federal cybersecurity requirements.

This role requires a technically proficient engineer capable of troubleshooting complex security technologies, analyzing vulnerabilities and security events, developing automated solutions, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to strengthen the organization's overall security posture across classified and unclassified environments.

• Administer, configure, maintain, and optimize enterprise vulnerability management platforms, primarily Tenable Security Center (Tenable.sc).
• Manage vulnerability scanning infrastructure, including scanner deployment, scan policies, scheduling, credential management, plugin updates, and operational troubleshooting.
• Conduct comprehensive vulnerability assessments across diverse enterprise computing environments, including servers, networks, applications, and infrastructure systems.
• Analyze vulnerability scan results to validate findings, identify false positives, assess severity, and prioritize remediation efforts based on risk and operational impact.
• Troubleshoot failed scans, scanner connectivity issues, credential failures, performance limitations, and detection anomalies.
• Collaborate with system administrators, infrastructure teams, and security personnel to develop remediation strategies, track vulnerabilities, and verify corrective actions.
• Engage directly with vendors, including Tenable, to resolve technical issues, investigate inaccurate findings, and validate software updates or detection improvements.
• Develop vulnerability reports, dashboards, and metrics to communicate security risks, remediation progress, and overall program effectiveness.

• Administer, configure, maintain, and enhance enterprise SIEM and centralized security logging platforms.
• Design, implement, and troubleshoot log collection architectures, event collectors, processing pipelines, indexing systems, and data ingestion workflows.
• Develop and maintain ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes to collect, normalize, transform, and integrate security event data from multiple enterprise sources.
• Integrate logs from operating systems, network devices, applications, security tools, and infrastructure platforms to improve enterprise security visibility.
• Monitor and troubleshoot log ingestion failures, parsing errors, data quality issues, and system performance concerns.
• Collaborate with system owners and cybersecurity teams to ensure logging and auditing practices align with NIST SP 800-53 Audit and Accountability (AU) controls across multiple classified enclaves.
• Identify gaps in logging coverage and implement enhancements to improve threat detection, incident investigation, and security monitoring.
• Develop and optimize security event searches, correlation rules, dashboards, and reporting capabilities to support threat hunting and incident response.
• Coordinate with software and technology vendors to resolve SIEM platform issues and improve logging capabilities.

• Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Information…