Senior Associate - SOC

Al Etihad Payments empowers employees to work in an environment that best promotes their productivity and well-being, while providing high-quality workplace and fantastic professional experience.

|Get to Know Us

Al Etihad Payments is the UAE’s designated retail payments entity, dedicated to developing and operating world-class infrastructure, standards, and solutions for the UAE Economy. Al Etihad Payments is a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE, strongly supported by the UAE Government.

Al Etihad Payments is the UAE’s designated retail payments entity, dedicated to developing and operating world-class infrastructure, standards, and solutions for the UAE Economy. Al Etihad Payments is a subsidiary of the Central Bank of the UAE, strongly supported by the UAE Government.

Our employees are committed to work with licensed financial institutions and other payment service providers to foster innovation and deliver excellent financial services to all in the UAE, efficiently and without friction.

Al Etihad Payments supports the government’s objectives of a cashless society, national digitization, and the Central Bank of the UAE objective of being a top ten central bank globally.

|Our Culture

We are a collaborative, diverse and passionate group of individuals that works as one team. We support one another, make impactful contributions to the organization, and develop and nurture meaningful connections across the payment’s ecosystem!

|About the role

Lead the day-to-day operations, governance, and continuous improvement of the Security Operations Center (SOC), ensuring effective detection, investigation, response, and monitoring of cybersecurity threats across AEP’s technology environment.

|What You’ll Do:

SOC Operations

• Lead day-to-day SOC operations and ensure continuous security monitoring.
• Oversee monitoring of SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and other security technologies.
• Ensure security alerts are appropriately triaged, investigated, escalated and closed.
• Review and optimize security use cases, correlation rules, detection logic and alert thresholds.
• Ensure appropriate prioritization of use cases based on business risk and threat intelligence.
• Monitor SOC KPIs including MTTD, MTTA, MTTR, incident closure time, SLA compliance and alert volumes.
• Liaise with Security Administration Team as and when needed for technical issues pertaining SOC.

Incident Response

• Lead investigation and response to security incidents, including high-severity and critical incidents.
• Coordinate with Network, Application, Infrastructure and other teams during incident response.
• Ensure appropriate escalation with relevant stakeholders.
• Coordinate containment, eradication and recovery activities.
• Conduct post-incident reviews and ensure lessons learned are incorporated into detection and response processes.

Threat Detection & Engineering

• Develop and continuously improve SOC detection capabilities.
• Identify gaps in security monitoring and log coverage.
• Ensure critical security logs are onboarded, retained and monitored appropriately.
• Work with threat intelligence and threat hunting teams to develop relevant detection use cases.

Governance & Compliance

• Maintain SOC procedures, playbooks, escalation matrices and operational documentation.
• Support regulatory, internal and external audits.
• Ensure SOC operations align with applicable regulatory requirements and frameworks such as ISO 27001, PCI DSS and UAE regulatory requirements, as applicable.
• Maintain evidence of monitoring, investigation, incident handling and SLA performance.

Qualifications & Years of Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity, Information Security, Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years of cybersecurity/security operations experience, with relevant SOC leadership experience.
• Experience managing enterprise SOC operations and/or MSSP.
• Strong SIEM, SOAR and EDR/XDR experience.
• Strong understanding of network, endpoint, identity and application security.

Required Skills

• CISSP/CISM.
• GIAC certifications.
• Hands on Experience in Splunk/ XSOAR.
• Splunk / Palo Alto / Fortinet or other relevant technology certifications.
• SIEM & Log Management: Advanced administration and detection-engineering experience with enterprise SIEM platform Splunk Enterprise Security.
• Threat Hunting & Intelligence: Ability to operationalize Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) feeds and proactively hunts for hidden threats using frameworks like the MITRE ATT&CK Framework.

|What you can expect from us

• Modern work environment with level of flexibility;
• Dynamic and motivated team of colleagues working towards achieving UAE National Objectives;
• Competitive compensation package, including annual bonus and additional benefits like child educational allowance and annual flight tickets (where eligible);
• Comprehensive health insurance coverage;