Director, Security Engineering & Operations
The Director of Security Engineering and Operations will lead a multi-disciplinary team that provides engineering development for key security platforms and solutions as well as operations teams that ensure clients Bank remains a safe place to do business.
This role is accountable for ensuring the timely delivery of new security solutions and capabilities that further advance our Security Strategy, and ensuring those platforms are maintained to our heightened standards as defined through the Site Reliability Engineering(SRE) Center of Excellence). This role is also accountable for collaborating with the Johnston, RI Fusion Center to provide a Follow-the-Sun operational capability for cyber and technology event detection and incident response. This is role is pivotal to helping achieve availability, performance, recovery, and security posture across critical services while partnering with other SRE functions across ET&S.
Key Responsibilities
Strategy & Leadership
• Oversee security engineering teams that are delivering platforms and solutions that achieve the Security Strategy.
• Assist in the implementation and delivery of the SRE capabilities for Security Technology solutions, including roadmap, operating model, and success metrics.
• Lead and develop a team of Security SREs; drive hiring, coaching, performance management, and career growth.
• Establish a culture of blameless learning, automation, engineering rigor, and pragmatic risk management.
Reliability + Security Engineering Outcomes
• Build security reliability capabilities such as:
o Secure service baselines (hardening, guardrails, policy-as-code, secure defaults)
o Resilience engineering (fault tolerance, graceful degradation, chaos testing)
o Recovery engineering (backup integrity, DR readiness, restore automation)
o Security observability (detection engineering + actionable telemetry)
• Drive improvements to SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, and operational maturity for mission-critical systems.
• Partner with teams to architect and implement controls that reduce risk without slowing delivery.
Incident Response, Resilience & Crisis Leadership
• Establish a peer operational capability to the Johnston, RI Fusion Center. Drive operational collaboration across ETS teams to improve detection and response.
• Serve as an escalation leader for high-severity security and technology incidents.
• Refine and improve incident management practices: on-call, runbooks, playbooks, postmortems, and corrective action tracking.
• Ensure root causes are addressed through engineering fixes, not manual processes.
Platform, Automation & Tooling
• Implement automation for repeatable reliability and security controls:
o CI/CD guardrails, secrets management, configuration integrity, policy enforcement
o Automated remediation and safe rollout patterns
• Improve platform capabilities: service templates, golden paths, reliability patterns, secure deployment standards.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance Enablement
• Translate risk and compliance objectives into technical solutions and operational controls.
• Produce evidence and metrics needed for audits (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP, etc., as applicable).
• Establish executive-level reporting on reliability/security posture, incident trends, and risk reduction.
Cross-Functional Influence
• Partner with:
o Product/Platform Engineering on architecture and delivery
o Security Engineering on controls and threat-informed priorities
o GRC/Compliance on control design and evidence
o Infrastructure/Operations on resiliency and performance
• Communicate effectively with executives and stakeholders during planning and incidents.
Required Qualifications
• 10+ years in SRE, production engineering, platform engineering, or security engineering roles, with 5+ years leading teams.
• Proven track record improving availability, latency, incident response, and operational maturity for large-scale systems.
• Strong understanding of modern security fundamentals:
o identity/access, secrets management, network security, vulnerability management
o secure SDLC, threat modeling, detection & response fundamentals
• Experience building scalable reliability practices: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, postmortems, on-call, automation.
• Executive-level communication skills: can translate technical risks into business impact.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience in regulated environments (SOC 2/ISO 27001/PCI/HIPAA/FedRAMP).
• Expertise with one or more:
o Cloud: AWS/Azure/GCP
o Containers: Kubernetes, service mesh
o IaC: Terraform, CloudFormation/Bicep
o CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab, Jenkins
o Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry
o SIEM/SOAR: Splunk, Sentinel, Chronicle, Cortex XSOAR
• Background in detection engineering, incident command, or purple-team collaboration.
• Experience building “golden paths” and internal developer platforms.
Core Competencies
• Systems thinking and pragmatic risk management
• Incident leadership under pressure
• Strong engineering standards and automation-first mindset
• Influencing across orgs without relying on authority
• Ability to balance speed, reliability, and security
About Cognizant:
Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) is an AI Builder and technology services provider, bridging the gap between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for our clients. Our deep industry, process and engineering expertise enables us to build an organization’s unique context into technology systems that amplify human potential, drive tangible outcomes and keep global enterprises ahead in a fast-changing world. See how at cognizant.ai or @cognizant.
Additional employment information
Compensation information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.
Applicants may be required to attend interviews in person or by video conference. In addition, candidates may be required to present their current state or government issued ID during each interview.
Cognizant is an equal opportunity employer. Your application and candidacy will not be considered based on race, color, sex, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
