Cybersecurity Defense SOC Lead

Company Overview

This is an opportunity to join Ascot Group – one of the world’s preeminent specialty risk underwriting organizations. Designed as a modern‑era company operating through an ecosystem of interconnected global operating platforms, we’re bound by a common mission and purpose: One Ascot. Our greatest strength is a talented team that flourishes in a collaborative, inclusive, and entrepreneurial culture, steeped in underwriting excellence, integrity, and a passion to find a better way, The Ascot Way.

The Ascot Way guides our people and our organization. Our underwriting platforms collaborate to find creative ways to deploy our capital in a true cross‑product and cross‑platform approach. These platforms work as one, deploying our capital creatively through our unique Fusion Model: Client Centric, Risk Centric, Technology Centric. Built to be resilient, Ascot maximizes client financial security while delivering bespoke products and world‑class service – both pre‑ and post‑claims. Ascot exists to solve for our clients’ brightest tomorrow, through agility, collaboration, resilience, and discipline.

Job Summary

As part of our 24x7 Cyber Defence function, the Security Operations Center Lead will be responsible for triaging, escalating, and managing cybersecurity events for Ascot, improving detection content and supporting the overall monitoring, detection, and cybersecurity incident response activities. Acting as an escalation point for L1/L2/L3 SOC analysts, this resource will work within an expanding cybersecurity team, collaborating with cybersecurity managers, IT infrastructure, and deskside support teams. You must be detail‑oriented, diligent, and capable of managing multiple aspects of the incident response lifecycle simultaneously. You will be supporting a 24x7 Cybersecurity Defence function that includes overseeing and managing a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) and teams across multiple time zones.

This resource will additionally be responsible for the overall day‑to‑day management of our SOC, maintaining detection content on the detection tool (detection rules, log ingestion, parsers, forwarders), maintaining playbooks, SOC documentation, and supporting integrations and log sources associated with the overall Cyber Defence solution. This role will be in the office with a hybrid work schedule and overseeing/managing a global team of resources.

Responsibilities

• Monitor our security tools to triage and respond to suspicious events and abnormal activities, capable of performing deep‑diving incident investigations.
• Serve as a point of escalation for the L1, L2, L3 SOC analysts, MSSP, and other vendors, coordinating response efforts with other groups and stakeholders with varying technical expertise, such as IT, Legal, business, etc.
• Stay current with evolving threats, vulnerabilities, tools, technologies and threat actor TTPs to help improve detection and response capabilities.
• Provide oversight and governance over the daily operations of the MSSP and SOC team at a global level.
• Mentor and provide training to junior SOC team members.
• Oversee the incident response process, ensuring rapid identification, containment, eradication, and recovery from security incidents.
• Develop and refine standard operating procedures in the form of run books and playbooks for incident response and threat detection.
• Create and make improvements to procedures and playbooks.
• Conduct technical analysis, log reviews, and assessments of cybersecurity incidents throughout the incident management lifecycle.
• Act as an Incident Commander during cybersecurity incidents working across incident confirmation, containment, and communicating to internal and external stakeholders.
• Work with end users, vendors, and MSSP where appropriate on security‑related incidents through closure.
• Manage and create incident reports, identify improvements to detect and prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
• Document and manage incident cases to utilize information for stakeholder engagement to provide insight, intelligent recommendations, risk reporting and lessons learned.
• Work in scheduled shift patterns when required.
• Conduct in‑depth security investigations, log analysis, network/email traffic assessment, and evaluate other data sources to identify root causes, assess impact, and gather evidence for response and mitigating actions.
• Implement detection use cases within our SIEM for our expanding estate using appropriate scripting languages.
• Manage log sources, log ingestion volumes, detection content and overall SIEM solution system health, maintenance, and upgrades.
• Assist with additional ad hoc projects as required.
• Run and coordinate annual cybersecurity tabletop exercises, that spread across both technical and non‑technical areas and testing.
• Support Red, Purple and Blue Teaming exercises, prioritizing findings and overseeing the implementation of recommendations.

Requirements

• Cybersecurity related degree (Bachelor’s and/or Master’s) or related work experience.
• Minimum of 10 years of experience in a security operations role, SOC engineering and/or a cybersecurity technical engineering role.
• Exposure to building and migrating log sources onto a new SIEM platform, creating detection content, log parsers and detection engineering.
• Alternatively, candidates that have worked in senior technical roles in a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) will be preferred.
• Preference will be given to candidates who also have additional technical and cyber‑risk certifications covering both defensive and offensive security such as CompTIA Security+, Certified SOC Analyst (CSA), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), CySA+, CISSP, GSEC, GCIH, CCSP, Microsoft SC‑200, CISSP‑ISSMP, CTIA, OSCP.
• Candidates must have solid experience and knowledge of typical enterprise technologies.
• On‑premises and cloud‑based Windows and Linux operating systems, Microsoft Azure, M365 and the ability to detect signs of compromise in these systems.
• Possess a growth mindset and is willing to learn how to resolve technical security issues.
• Demonstrate a working and genuine interest and talent in Cybersecurity.
• Demonstrate detail orientation and can take a structured approach to procedures and working instructions.
• Work and maintain a calm structured mindset even when under pressure.
• Possess an aptitude for understanding and analysing data when troubleshooting.
• Strong written communication, critical thinking, and analysis skills, including the ability to present potential risks and actual findings to a wide audience.
• Ability to communicate complex problems to a non‑technical audience.
• Must have a working understanding of key security concepts and attack types such as phishing, malware, vulnerabilities, Cyber Kill Chain, and attack stages.
• A strong analytical mindset, capable of digesting a wide range of information to make practical judgements based on available data and context.
• Experience with security tools and technologies, including SIEM, intrusion detection systems, EDR, XDR, log analysis, and malware analysis.
• Understand threat actor tactics, techniques and procedures, have familiarity with the MITRE‑ATT&CK Framework and different stages of an attack lifecycle.
• Maintain a desire to keep learning, with a curious and creative growth mindset.