Senior Cloud Technical Project Manager

Senior Cloud Technical Project Manager

This position requires a Public Trust or ability to acquire a Public Trust

The Senior Cloud Technical Manager leads cloud-focused security operations supporting the National Science Foundation (NSF). This position owns technical execution across cloud security monitoring, incident response, vulnerability management, and secure cloud operations. The role drives maturity in detection engineering, automation, governance, and compliance while leading a team responsible for protecting NSF cloud environments and enabling mission delivery through secure, reliable, and scalable operations.

Estimated Starting Salary Range for Senior Cloud Technical Manager: $165,000-$170,000

Pay commensurate with experience.

Full-time benefits include Medical, Dental, Vision, 401K, and other possible benefits as provided. Benefits are subject to change with or without notice.

• Lead cloud security operations for NSF AWS environments, including triage, investigation, containment, and recovery.
• Own Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) content and operations, including data onboarding, Common Information Model (CIM) alignment, correlation searches, notable event tuning, risk-based alerting (RBA), dashboards, and reporting.
• Own Prisma Cloud Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) outcomes, including posture baselines, policy standards and exceptions, remediation workflows, and risk-reduction tracking.
• Engineer and mature AWS logging and detection coverage. Integrate and operationalize Cloud Trail, VPC Flow Logs, Route 53 Resolver logs, ALB/ELB logs, AWS Config, Cloud Watch, Guard Duty, and Security Hub into Splunk ES and Prisma Cloud.
• Lead detection engineering mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. Improve detection fidelity, reduce false positives, and drive use-case lifecycle management.
• Define and execute AWS incident response playbooks and escalation paths. Ensure evidence capture, timeline reconstruction, and post-incident corrective actions.
• Drive continuous monitoring and compliance alignment with federal requirements, including FISMA and NIST 800-53. Support audits through repeatable evidence packages.
• Partner with cloud platform, network, and application teams to implement security guardrails, including IAM least privilege, MFA, KMS encryption, segmentation, centralized logging, and secure configurations.
• Prioritize and track remediation of misconfigurations and security findings identified through Prisma Cloud, AWS services, and Splunk ES investigations.
• Automate key security workflows where possible, including enrichment, ticketing, evidence capture, and containment actions using scripting and integration patterns.
• Establish operational metrics and reporting cadence, including MTTD, MTTR, detection coverage, backlog, and security posture trends.
• Manage team performance, technical quality, and delivery commitments while mentoring analysts and engineers.
• Participate in after-hours escalation and on-call activities as needed.
• Perform other job-related duties as assigned.

• 7+ years of experience in cybersecurity, cloud security, or security operations, including 3+ years leading technical teams.
• Hands-on experience securing and operating production cloud environments. AWS and/or Azure experience preferred; GCP experience is acceptable.
• Strong experience with SIEM operations, log onboarding, correlation rules, alert tuning, and investigative workflows.
• Experience with cloud incident response, including evidence handling and root-cause analysis.
• Working knowledge of cloud IAM, networking, encryption, key management, and secure service configurations.
• Experience with vulnerability management tools and coordinating remediation across engineering teams.
• Ability to write clear operational documentation and deliver concise, executive-ready status reporting.
• Security-first technical leadership with decisive incident-command capabilities.
• Strong prioritization and risk-based decision-making skills.
• Ability to drive effective execution across technical and business teams.
• Clear communication skills with both technical teams and senior stakeholders.
• Continuous-improvement mindset focused on measurable outcomes.
• Public Trust preferred.
• Must pass pre-employment qualifications of Cherokee Federal.

Criterion Systems, LLC, a Cherokee Federal company

Criterion Systems falls under Cherokee Federal. The position supports the National Science Foundation…