Security Operations Engineer – Role Summary

The company is a  veterinary technology organization that supports veterinary practices, pet owners, and animal health services. If I’m not mistaken, the amount of ppl in the company is about 500ppl, and it is part of the larger Mars Incorporated ecosystem, giving it access to enterprise-level cybersecurity resources, tooling, and investment.

The engineering organization already has:

• A collaborative Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team of 4 engineers, with additional SRE contractors being hired.

• A Senior Manager of Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) who owns compliance, risk management, and audit-related activities.

• Existing SOC 1, SOC 2, and PCI compliance programs, with a NIST assessment planned.

• Cloud infrastructure primarily running on GCP, while AWS and Azure environments are being integrated through recent acquisitions.

• Ownership of internal AI platforms and engineering enablement tooling.

Current Gap

While the company has strong infrastructure, compliance leadership, and engineering capabilities, it does not yet have a dedicated Security Operations engineer responsible for translating security requirements into technical implementation and operational practices. This will be the SecOps hire, making the role highly influential in shaping the organization’s security strategy and execution.

Main Responsibilities

• Assess the current security posture across cloud environments, applications, and enterprise systems.

• Develop and drive a prioritized security roadmap.

• Implement DevSecOps practices, security automation, and security controls across the SDLC and infrastructure.

• Partner with the GRC leader to operationalize compliance requirements and close security gaps.

• Improve vulnerability management, monitoring, incident response, penetration testing, and security readiness.

Primary Focus

Build and lead the organization’s operational security capability, helping the company mature from a compliance-driven security program to a proactive, security-by-design organization that can securely support multi-cloud growth, AI initiatives, and future business expansion.

• Security Architecture & Hardening: Design and enforce security best practices across cloud environments, operating systems, networks, and containers. Implement zero-trust architectures and rigorous least-privilege access controls.

• Identity & Access Management: Policy enforcement, audit and governance.

• Vulnerability & Threat Management: Lead regular vulnerability assessments, threat modeling, and coordinate penetration testing efforts. Automate the patching and remediation lifecycle across the infrastructure.

• Incident Response: Serve as a primary technical escalation point for security events; lead active threat hunting, investigations, root cause analysis, and post-mortem reporting.

• Security Observability: Deploy and manage SIEM platforms, IDS/IPS, and centralized logging to proactively monitor for system anomalies and security breaches.

• Application Security (AppSec): Advise on application security design.

• DevSecOps & Automation: Integrate SAST, DAST, and SCA scanning into CI/CD pipelines. Implement secrets management and automate infrastructure compliance using IaC.

• Reliability & Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot complex infrastructure and network issues while maintaining availability and performance.

• Compliance & Governance: Enforce security frameworks such as CIS benchmarks and NIST and support security audits.

• AI Governance: Leverage AI in day-to-day responsibilities and enforce AI GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) standards.

• Create and maintain SecOps and SRE agents within the SDLC using AI capabilities.

• Design and test Disaster Recovery processes annually.

• Cybersecurity Tooling: CrowdStrike, Obsidian, Wiz

• 4+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, Site Reliability Engineering, or DevOps with a strong cybersecurity focus.

• Experience with agentic AI frameworks (e.g., Gemini, Claude).

• Expertise in IAM, encryption architectures, and network security.

• Experience with SIEMs, WAFs, EDR, and CSPM platforms.

• Experience integrating security controls into deployment pipelines.

• Strong Linux and scripting experience (Python, Bash, Go) focused on security automation and remediation.

• Container security expertise (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Experience with SOC1/2, PCI, and similar compliance standards.

• Knowledge of Next-Gen Firewalls, ACLs, VPNs, and ZTNA.

• Certifications such as CISSP, CISM, AWS/GCP/Azure Security Specialty, or CKS.

• Understanding of penetration testing, Red/Blue Team exercises, and incident response.

• Strong root-cause analysis skills across infrastructure, networks, and applications.

• Ability to create architecture diagrams and threat models.

• Availability for occasional maintenance and on-call support.