Associate Director, Cyber Defense - Incident Responder

Position: Associate Director, Cyber Defense - Staff Incident Responder
Overview Alnylam is pioneering RNAi therapeutics and scaling rapidly across research, development, manufacturing, and global commercialization. The Associate Director, Cyber Defense – Staff Incident Responder will play a critical role in protecting the enterprise by leading complex cyber investigations and advancing detection and response capabilities across a global environment.

Reporting to the Senior Director, Cyber Defense, this senior individual contributor will operate in a highly technical, hands-on capacity—driving incident response, forensic analysis, and threat hunting while shaping how Alnylam detects, investigates, and responds to advanced threats. This role will also help evolve detection and response capabilities through tooling, automation, and scalable engineering approaches.

This is a hybrid position, primarily based in Cambridge, MA and includes participation in an on-call rotation, with flexibility to support incident response outside standard business hours, as needed.

Responsibilities Lead complex cyber investigations and incident response across global environments, driving end-to-end containment, eradication, and recovery

Perform advanced forensic analysis and proactive threat hunting to identify attacker behavior, persistence mechanisms, and lateral movement

Translate investigation findings into scalable improvements in detection coverage, telemetry, and response effectiveness

Develop and enhance incident response playbooks, investigation workflows, and containment strategies based on real-world threats

Improve response speed and effectiveness through detection engineering, alert tuning, automation, and removal of systemic bottlenecks

Build and evolve incident response tooling, scripts, and integrations to enable scalable and efficient operations

Influence and optimize the security tooling ecosystem to improve signal quality, visibility, and investigative outcomes

Lead post-incident analysis, producing clear, actionable reports that drive remediation and strengthen security posture

Partner cross-functionally to drive remediation, hardening, and long-term risk reduction across the enterprise

Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior responders while guiding best practices across Cyber Defense

Qualifications8+ years of hands-on experience in incident response, digital forensics, threat hunting, or security operations within enterprise environments (including cloud)
Deep investigative expertise across endpoint, cloud, network, and identity domains, including correlation of multi-source telemetry and forensic artifacts

Strong scripting and automation skills (e.g., Python, Go, Power Shell, Bash) to support scalable investigation and response workflows

Proven ability to independently lead complex investigations and make high-confidence technical decisions in high-pressure environments

Strong understanding of attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures, including experience with frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK Experience applying industry incident response frameworks (e.g., NIST, CISA) in real-world scenarios

Demonstrated impact improving detection and response through tooling, process, or program enhancements

Experience leading cross-functional initiatives with enterprise-wide impact

Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate technical findings, risks, and recommendations for technical and non-technical stakeholders

About Alnylam We are the leader in RNAi therapeutics – a revolutionary approach with the potential to transform the lives of people with rare and common diseases. Built on Nobel Prize-winning science, Alnylam has delivered the breakthroughs that made RNAi therapeutics possible and are just at the beginning of what’s possible. Our deep pipeline,…