Security Operations Center Manager (CBP)

About Agile Defense

At Agile Defense we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. That’s why we always look to the future and embrace change with an unmovable spirit and the courage to build for what comes next.

Our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to support our nation's most important missions through the seamless integration of advanced technologies, elite minds, and unparalleled agility—leveraging a foundation of speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect our nation’s vital interests.

Title: Security Operations Center Manager

Clearance: Active Top Secret with SCI Eligibility, ability to obtain and maintain a CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD, active BI strongly preferred. We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold one.

Citizenship: U.S. Citizenship required

Location: Reston, VA - Hybrid 3 to 5 days

Salary Range: $155,000-$185,000

Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.

Required Certification(s): CISSP, and one of the following: GCFA, GREM, GCIH, OSCP, GPEN, GFCE or equivalent preferred.

The Role

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. Every system that keeps that mission running, biometric checks against watchlists, apprehension processing, surveillance feeds, is also a target. An intrusion that goes undetected does not just risk data. It risks the same operational capability an outage would take down, except an adversary chose the timing.

You run the security operations center that watches for that. You own its people, process, and performance: how alerts get triaged, how work gets prioritized when everything looks urgent at once, and how the center performs as a whole rather than as a collection of individual analysts. You will work closely with the leads who run insider threat monitoring, threat hunting, incident response, digital forensics, and vulnerability assessment, and you are accountable for how well those functions work together, not just how well each one works alone.

One thing is worth knowing before you apply. A SOC that catches everything but cannot tell leadership what happened in terms they can act on has not actually done its job. Managing up and out is as much a part of this role as managing the floor.

What Success Looks Like

Objective 1: Run a SOC that catches what matters and does not drown in what does not

Alert volume gets triaged fast enough that a real incident does not sit in a queue behind noise.

Analysts know what to escalate and what to close, and the standard for that decision is written down rather than tribal knowledge.

Recurring false positives get tuned out at the source instead of re-triaged every shift.

Objective 2: Make the SOC's specialist functions work as one operation

Insider threat, threat hunt, incident response, forensics, and vulnerability assessment hand work to each other cleanly, without a finding stalling because nobody owned the next step.

You can tell which function is under strain before it becomes the SOC's bottleneck.

Coverage holds across shifts and gaps in staffing, rather than depending on who happens to be on duty.

Objective 3: Give leadership an accurate picture of the SOC's performance and the program's exposure

Reporting to leadership tells them what changed and what it means, not just a count of tickets closed.

Risk that needs a decision above your level reaches that decision maker while there is still time to act on it.

An incident's real severity and impact get communicated accurately the first time, not revised upward after the fact.

⠀Objective 4: Build a SOC that gets better at its job over time

Lessons from real incidents change how the SOC operates, not just what gets written in an after-action report.

Analysts get better at their craft under you, not just busier.

Standards and playbooks exist for the SOC's recurring work, and they get followed because they hold up under real conditions.

What You Bring

Minimum required experience

Candidates will have a minimum of fice (5) years of direct operational and program management experience in delivery of Cybersecurity program or related projects.

Candidates will have a minimum of seven (7) years of professional experience with a solid understanding of incident response, insider threat investigations, digital forensics, and cyber threats.

Candidates for this role possess minimum of five (5) years of cybersecurity experience, with at least 5 years in a SOC leadership capacity.

In-depth technical expertise in areas such as SIEM, EDR, and incident response methodologies is essential, coupled with a thorough understanding of network architectures and security controls.

The ability to create insider threat focused dashboards, reports and workflow diagrams. Experience collecting data, chain of custody and reporting results; handling and escalating security issues or emergency situations appropriately; providing incident response capabilities to isolate and mitigate threats to maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability for protected data.

Experience with mentoring junior members in an open collaborative environment.

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, STEM or cybersecurity

One of the following certifications: GCFA, GREM, GCIH, OSCP, GPEN, GFCE or equivalent preferred.

Preferred Experience

You have run a security operations center or an equivalent detection and response function, not only worked inside one as an analyst.

You have managed a team through a real incident and can describe what you would do differently.

You have reported security posture and incidents to non-technical leadership and can describe what changed in how you communicate because of it.

You have worked inside a federal or highly regulated security program and know what that adds to the job beyond the technical work.

You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.

You are comfortable across the disciplines your team covers, insider threat, threat hunting, incident response, forensics, and vulnerability assessment, even where you are not the deepest technical expert in each.

Certifications such as CISSP, GCIH, or CISM are useful, but they are not a substitute for having run the function.

A note on timing

We are staffing this program now. If you already hold an active CBP BI and EOD, your start date is short and a $10,000 signing bonus comes with the role, payable after 90 days under standard terms. We would like to talk this week.

If you do not, we can begin processing a CBP BI for you. That takes months rather than weeks, so applying now means joining a pipeline rather than starting immediately. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out after you apply.

Employee Benefits

Agile's benefits offerings include, dependent upon position, Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, Holiday Pay, short-term and long-term Disability, Retirement and Learning and Development opportunities as well as other optional benefit elections.