Security Operations Center Lead

Job Details:

Job Description:

About the Role

Altera is seeking an experienced and hands-on Security Operations Center Lead to lead and mature our global security monitoring, detection, incident response, and cyber defense capabilities. This role will be responsible for day-to-day SOC operations, alert triage, incident escalation, use case development, playbook execution, threat monitoring, and operational reporting across enterprise IT, cloud, identity, endpoint, network, and application environments.

This leader will partner closely with security engineering, infrastructure, identity, cloud, IT operations, legal, privacy, product security, and managed service providers to ensure security events are detected, investigated, contained, and remediated effectively. The ideal candidate combines strong technical security operations depth with leadership discipline, process ownership, and the ability to drive measurable improvements in detection coverage, response quality, automation, and operational resilience.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead daily SOC operations across monitoring, alert triage, investigation, escalation, incident response coordination, and operational handoff across global time zones.
• Own and mature SOC operating procedures, including incident intake, severity classification, escalation paths, response playbooks, major incident communications, and post-incident reviews.
• Manage and improve security monitoring across SIEM, SOAR, EDR/XDR, email security, cloud security, identity security, vulnerability signals, network telemetry, and threat intelligence sources.
• Build, tune, and continuously improve detection use cases aligned to enterprise risks, MITRE ATT&CK techniques, threat intelligence, audit findings, and business-critical assets.
• Partner with security engineering teams to improve log onboarding, data quality, telemetry coverage, alert fidelity, automation, and response integrations.
• Lead incident response coordination for security events involving endpoint compromise, identity misuse, phishing, malware, data loss indicators, cloud misconfigurations, suspicious network activity, and unauthorized access attempts.
• Establish SOC performance metrics and reporting, including alert volumes, false-positive rates, SLA adherence, escalation quality, mean time to detect, mean time to acknowledge, mean time to contain, and incident trends.
• Oversee SOC analyst workflows, shift handoffs, case documentation, evidence handling, and quality assurance reviews.
• Coordinate with managed security service providers, internal IT teams, and business stakeholders to ensure timely response and clear ownership of remediation actions.
• Support implementation and operationalization of SOAR playbooks, automation workflows, enrichment logic, and incident response runbooks.
• Drive continuous improvement through tabletop exercises, incident retrospectives, purple-team findings, threat hunting outputs, and lessons learned.
• Maintain alignment with security governance, regulatory, privacy, and audit requirements by ensuring SOC processes are documented, repeatable, measurable, and evidence-ready.
• Serve as a security operations lead for global SOC coverage and cross-functional collaboration.

Success Measures

• Improved detection coverage across high-risk assets, identity systems, cloud services, endpoints, and enterprise applications.
• Reduced false positives and improved alert quality through tuning, enrichment, and automation.
• Faster and more consistent incident triage, containment, escalation, and closure.
• Clear SOC operating model with documented playbooks, SLAs, handoff processes, and executive-ready reporting.
• Improved incident readiness through exercises, retrospectives, and continuous improvement.
• Strong partnership across IT, security engineering, cloud, identity, legal, privacy, product security, and managed service providers.

Salary Range

The pay range below is for Bay Area California only. Actual salary may vary based on a number of factors including job location, job-related knowledge, skills, experiences, trainings, etc. We also offer incentive opportunities that reward employees based on individual and company performance.

 

$149,100 - $215,925 USD

 

We use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for the position. Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations.

#LI-MD1

Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Security, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of progressive cybersecurity experience, including significant hands-on experience in security operations, incident response, threat detection, or SOC leadership.
• 3+ years of experience leading SOC analysts, incident response teams, managed security operations, or cross-functional cyber defense workflows.
• Strong working knowledge of SIEM, SOAR, EDR/XDR, cloud security monitoring, identity security, email security, network security, and incident response processes.
• Demonstrated experience building or improving detection use cases, alert triage workflows, response playbooks, escalation procedures, and SOC metrics.
• Experience coordinating investigations involving phishing, malware, endpoint compromise, suspicious authentication, privileged access misuse, data exposure, and cloud security events.
• Familiarity with frameworks and standards such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST CSF, NIST SP 800-61, ISO 27001, CIS Controls, or equivalent cyber defense frameworks.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical teams, business stakeholders, senior leadership, and external partners during security incidents.
• Strong analytical, documentation, prioritization, and decision-making skills in high-pressure operational environments.
• CISSP, Security+, or equivalent industry certification.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating or transforming a global SOC in an enterprise environment.
• Experience working as an Incident Commander, leading IR execution for the company.
• Experience working with Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR, KQLs, UEBA, or comparable security operations platforms.
• Experience with cloud security monitoring across Azure, AWS, GCP, or hybrid cloud environments.
• Experience with threat hunting, purple-team collaboration, adversary emulation, or detection engineering.
• Experience managing managed detection and response providers or outsourced SOC services.
• Experience in semiconductor, technology, manufacturing, or intellectual property-intensive environments.
• Familiarity with GenAI-assisted SOC workflows, including alert enrichment, analyst productivity, incident summarization, and security automation.
• Additional certifications such as CEH, or similar.

Job Type:

Regular

Shift:

Shift 1 (United States of America)

Primary Location:

San Jose, California, United States

Additional Locations:

Posting Statement:

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, religious creed, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, military and veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by local law, regulation, or ordinance.