Engineering Technical Lead in Manchester

This role leads the Security Engineering team within ANS’s Security Operations Centre. It is a pivotal position responsible for driving onboarding, tuning, rule deployment, and technical platform support during customer transitions, as well as overseeing engineering-led activity within live services. As a people leader, you will bring structure, clarity, and calm to a highly capable team that thrives on technical challenges. You’ll apply emotional intelligence, professional resilience, and strong coaching skills to support their development, strengthen alignment and prioritisation, and ensure consistent, high‑quality delivery.

What will I do?

• Lead and schedule the SOC Engineering team to ensure clarity, consistency and manageable workloads across onboarding and live services.
• Own the delivery of engineering activity during customer onboarding and transition, including Sentinel connector setup, Microsoft Defender integration, rule tuning, and SOAR playbook deployment.
• Ensure structured service handover to SOC Analysts post-onboarding, with clear technical documentation and expectations.
• Act as escalation point for complex engineering‑led issues in live environments, maintaining SLAs and platform health.
• Drive continual improvement in detection logic, rule effectiveness, enrichment, automation and engineering playbooks.
• Provide technical leadership in core tooling: Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Cloud, Entra ID and integration platforms.
• Champion best practices in customer environment configuration, data ingestion, and engineering change control.
• Bring structure to engineering reporting and team outputs, with clarity on ownership, outcomes, and next steps.
• Support the development of junior engineers, setting standards for communication, time management and delivery focus.

What will I bring to the role?

• Experience managing or leading a technical security engineering team within an MSP, MSSP or SOC environment.
• Proven experience with Microsoft Security Suite (Sentinel, Defender XDR, Defender for Cloud) and Sentinel setup/integration.
• Strong technical expertise with Microsoft Azure (Azure AD, Lighthouse, and security architecture).
• Proven experience configuring connectors, setting up data ingestion, and tuning detection rules.
• Experience with Google Chronicle SOAR or other SOAR/SIEM platforms.
• Comfortable writing or modifying KQL queries, understanding detection logic, and debugging enrichment issues.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, able to translate technical activity into customer‑facing updates.
• High emotional intelligence able to support and guide a stretched team, while holding standards and focus.
• Ability to set priorities, manage competing demands and keep work structured in fast‑paced environments.
• Prior exposure to cost control in log ingestion or cloud service consumption.
• Strong collaboration skills, with the ability to interface effectively with analysts, architects, and customers.
• Experience with additional integrations such as Mimecast, Darktrace, or legacy EDR platforms.
• Understanding of ITIL processes, especially change and incident management.
• Knowledge of Google Cloud Platform.
• Knowledge of AWS.

Why work for ANS?

At ANS, we’ve created a place where everyone can be themselves, and we empower our people to get the job done. Openness, ambition, honesty, and passion are what drive us every day. We are bold, courageous, and innovative – and we do it like no other. We invest in our people. In training, development, health and more – we give you the benefits and flexibility to maintain a happy work‑life balance. We’re proud of the inclusive, fun, dynamic environment we’ve created. It’s a safe space that works for all. You don’t have to be a techie to work in tech. Bring your authentic self and find your dream role here.

What’s in it for you?

• 25 days’ holiday, plus you can buy up to 5 more days.
• Birthday off, and an extra celebration day for whatever you want!
• 5 days’ additional holiday in the year you get married.
• 5 volunteer days.
• Private health insurance.
• Pension contribution match and 4 x life assurance.
• Flexible working and work from anywhere for up to 30 days per year (some exceptions).
• Company social events – get ready for a jam-packed calendar.
• Electric car scheme.
• 12 days of personal growth development time.

ANS are an equal opportunities employer. We encourage diversity and anyone applying for a role at our organisation can be assured that their application will be treated fairly, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, gender expression, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and sex or sexual orientation.