Lead Security Operations Center Analyst (f/m/d)

We are looking for a highly experienced and technically skilled Lead Security Operations Centre (SOC) Analyst to join our team and take ownership of the day to day operation and continuous improvement of our Security Operations Centre. This role combines deep technical expertise with operational leadership, people management, and project delivery responsibilities, ensuring the SOC remains effective in identifying, investigating, and responding to advanced security threats, issues, and vulnerabilities across the organisation. 

As the lead member of the team, you will oversee SOC operations, manage and coordinate complex security investigations, and provide technical leadership during all incidents. You will lead investigations into sophisticated threats such as advanced persistent threats (APTs), malware outbreaks, and targeted attacks, whilst performing hands on analysis of security events, forensic evidence collection, and root cause analysis. You will also drive the development and enhancement of detection capabilities across SIEM, EDR, and other monitoring technologies, while continuously improving SOC processes, procedures, workflows, automation, and playbooks to increase operational effectiveness and maturity. 

You will actively engage in threat hunting, leveraging your deep understanding of application code, infrastructure and hosting architectures (cloud and on premises), the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and CI/CD pipeline solutions to identify risks that span traditional and cloud native environments.  
 
You will collaborate closely with Security Engineering, IT, DevOps, and application teams to improve detection coverage, enhance monitoring capabilities, and strengthen the organisation's overall security posture. Alongside your technical responsibilities, you will provide line management for SOC analysts, including mentoring, coaching, performance management, and professional development, whilst overseeing workload prioritisation, SOC reporting, and the successful delivery of projects associated with SOC tooling, automation, compliance, and operational maturity. 

This role encompasses reactive incident response, proactive detection engineering, threat hunting, vulnerability management, and operational leadership. You will also contribute to strategic initiatives including penetration testing coordination, security assessments, audit preparation, threat intelligence activities, and the maintenance of SOC documentation and reporting. 

This role sits within the Product Operations and Corporate IT branch, reporting to the Director of Cyber Security and Networking, and operates as part of the broader Cyber Security, Network, and Security Engineering teams. 

Main responsibilities:

• Independently investigate and respond to security alerts and events from SIEM, EDR, and other security tools across endpoints, networks, cloud platforms, and applications.
• Lead proactive threat hunting activities, leveraging threat intelligence, application logs, and infrastructure telemetry to uncover indicators of compromise or stealthy threat activity.
• Perform in-depth analysis of logs, API configurations and traffic, container environments, network data, application and infrastructure architecture, as well as data center hosting environments to support threat detection, incident investigation, and root cause analysis.
• Manage complex cybersecurity incidents end-to-end, including containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident analysis, while coordinating closely with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Deploy, operate, configure, and tune SIEM platforms and detection tools to enhance signal accuracy, reduce alert fatigue, and maintain effective detection coverage.
• Design, build, and maintain incident response playbooks and automation workflows to increase the efficiency, speed, and consistency of incident response processes.
• Simultaneously manage multiple active investigations and day-to-day SOC operations, effectively prioritising tasks and managing time under pressure.
• Conduct forensic analysis during investigations, including evidence preservation, malware analysis, memory examination, and root cause identification.
• Collaborate with DevOps, IT, and development teams to ensure timely containment, mitigation, and remediation of vulnerabilities and threats.
• Coordinate outputs from security assessment tools and penetration tests, ensuring clear ownership and timely closure of identified issues.
• Participate in and lead security testing exercises to evaluate and strengthen detection capabilities and response procedures.
• Drive continuous improvement of SOC operations by identifying logging gaps, proposing monitoring enhancements, and introducing new detection or response technologies.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of investigations, incidents, tuning efforts, and threat intelligence to support reporting, knowledge sharing, and audit readiness.
• Stay current with evolving threat landscapes, adversary techniques, and emerging security tools and practices to strengthen SOC capabilities.
• Adapt SOC processes, solutions, and procedures to enhance the monitoring of the organization's IT network health.
• Ensure security operations and incident response practices are aligned with industry-recognized frameworks such as ISO 27001.
• Implement solutions within CI/CD pipelines to identify and block security issues reaching production environments
• Support the development and refinement of SOC procedures, training materials, and operational standards to enhance maturity and consistency across the team.
• Act as the operational lead for the SOC, overseeing day-to-day activities, workload prioritisation, incident coordination, and service delivery to ensure effective security monitoring and response capabilities.
• Provide line management, coaching, mentoring, and professional development support to SOC analysts, fostering a high-performing and collaborative security operations culture.