Senior Cyber Defense Analyst

About the Role

We at Abnormal AI are looking for a hands-on Security Operations/ Cyber Defense Analyst who thrives in a fast-paced, engineering-driven environment. You’ll be responsible for monitoring, investigating, and responding to security alerts across cloud, endpoint, identity, and application layers. You’ll work closely with detection engineers, cloud security, and IT teams to protect our hybrid environment from threats in real time.

This is not a “click-through-the-console” SOC role — we’re looking for someone who can think critically, automate relentlessly, and own incidents end-to-end.

Key Responsibilities

• Detection & Triage:

• Monitor alerts from tools like SIEM, EDR, IAM, CSPM, CDR etc.

• Perform initial triage, enrichment, and correlation across multiple data sources.

• Identify false positives and fine-tune rules with detection engineering.

• Incident Response:

• Lead containment, eradication, and recovery for endpoint, cloud, and identity incidents.

• Document and communicate incidents through SOAR/Jira/ServiceNow workflows.

• Perform root cause analysis and propose permanent preventive controls.

• Threat Hunting & Analysis:

• Proactively hunt using hypotheses mapped to MITRE ATT&CK.

• Investigate anomalies across CloudTrail, Okta, GitHub, and other telemetry sources.

• Collaborate with threat intelligence to identify emerging TTPs.

• Automation & Process Improvement:

• Build or enhance playbooks in SOAR (Torq or equivalent).

• Create custom enrichment scripts and automations (Python, Bash, etc.).

• Suggest new detection logic and operational improvements.

• Reporting & Metrics:

• Track and report operational metrics (MTTD, MTTR, incident categories).

• Maintain documentation and lessons learned.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 5-7 years of hands-on SOC or Incident Response experience in a cloud-first or hybrid environment.

• Strong understanding of attacker lifecycle, MITRE ATT&CK, and threat actor TTPs.

• Experience with EDR (CrowdStrike preferred), SIEM (Splunk preferred), and SOAR (Torq, XSOAR, or Phantom).

• Familiarity with AWS, Okta, and SaaS platforms.

• Proficiency in writing queries and automations using Python, SPL, or equivalent.

• Excellent analytical and investigative skills — capable of operating independently with minimal hand-holding.

• Strong documentation and communication skills for technical and executive audiences.

Nice to Have

• Experience with CSPM/CDR/VM tools.

• Knowledge of Containers and Kubernetes security.

• Relevant certifications like CEH, Security+, GCIH, GCIA, or AWS Security Specialty.

What Success Looks Like

• You consistently deliver high-quality triage with minimal false positives.

• You automate repetitive tasks instead of manually doing them twice.

• You can take a vague alert and turn it into a well-documented case with actionable findings.

#LI-EM5

• You make measurable improvements to detection coverage, response time, or tooling maturity.

At Abnormal AI, certain roles are eligible for a bonus, restricted stock units (RSUs), and benefits. Individual compensation packages are based on factors unique to each candidate, including their skills, experience, qualifications and other job-related reasons.

Base salary range:
$144,500—$170,000 USD

Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please click here. If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please click here.