Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cybersecurity Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Cybersecurity Manager leads the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of an enterprise information security program that protects the organization’s assets, data, and reputation. This role manages security operations (including SOC), incident response, vulnerability and risk management, and compliance activities across cloud and on-prem environments while partnering with engineering, product, legal and business stakeholders to enable secure business growth. Ideal for candidates with deep technical experience, proven leadership of security teams, and strong knowledge of frameworks (NIST, ISO 27001, CIS), cloud security, IAM, and regulatory compliance.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Security Engineer or Lead Security Engineer
Security Operations Center (SOC) Team Lead or Incident Response Lead
IT Manager or Risk & Compliance Manager with substantial security exposure

Advancement To:

Director of Information Security
Senior Director / VP of Security Operations
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Security Architect / Lead Cloud Security Engineer
Third-Party Risk & Vendor Security Manager
Security Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead and manage the day-to-day operations of the security organization, including the SOC, incident response team, threat hunting, and vulnerability management teams, ensuring 24/7 monitoring, rapid escalation, and continuous improvement of detection and response capabilities.
Own and drive the enterprise security program strategy and roadmap, translating business objectives into prioritized security initiatives, milestones, budgets, and measurable outcomes that reduce risk and align with corporate goals.
Design, implement, and maintain incident response policies and procedures; lead major incident response efforts end-to-end — forensic analysis, containment, remediation, root cause analysis, communication with stakeholders, and post-incident lessons learned.
Develop, monitor, and optimize security monitoring and detection capabilities (SIEM, EDR/XDR, network telemetry, cloud-native logging), including writing and tuning detection rules, use cases, playbooks, and automation (SOAR) for repeatable response.
Oversee a risk-based vulnerability management program that includes asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, prioritized remediation workflows, patch management coordination with IT and engineering, and metrics reporting to leadership.
Establish and maintain an identity and access management (IAM) governance program that enforces least privilege, centralized authentication/authorization controls, role-based access reviews, privileged access management, and SSO/MFA implementations across cloud and on-prem systems.
Lead security architecture reviews and threat modeling for new products, major platform changes, and third-party integrations to ensure secure design, data protection, encryption standards, and secure SDLC practices are consistently applied.
Serve as the security subject-matter expert partner to engineering, DevOps, product, and infrastructure teams to integrate security into CI/CD pipelines, IaC, container and orchestration security, and secure coding practices.
Manage third-party and vendor security risk assessments, contract security requirements, and continuous monitoring of critical suppliers, ensuring that vendor controls meet contractual and regulatory obligations.
Drive regulatory compliance and audit readiness activities (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR) including controls implementation, evidence collection, gap remediation and coordination with external auditors and assessors.
Create and enforce formal security policies, standards, procedures and role-based responsibilities that scale across business units, cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP), and geographies while keeping policies practical and business enabling.
Build, hire, mentor and retain high-performing security teams by defining clear career paths, training programs, performance metrics and coaching to accelerate skill development and team maturity.
Define, track, and communicate key security KPIs and metrics (MTTR, time-to-detect, number of incidents, vulnerability remediation rates, mean time to remediate, coverage of EDR/IDS) and produce executive-level reporting and dashboards to quantify security posture.
Implement a proactive threat intelligence and threat hunting program that ingests external feeds, maps adversary tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), and converts intelligence into prioritized detection and mitigation actions.
Lead secure configuration baselines and hardening for servers, endpoints, cloud workloads, containers, networking, and identity platforms and partner with IT to operationalize configuration management and drift detection.
Oversee data protection and privacy controls, including data classification, encryption key management, data loss prevention (DLP), and remediation plans to protect sensitive information across product and operational environments.
Coordinate business continuity, disaster recovery and incident communication planning for security events, ensuring tested playbooks, cross-functional runbooks, and stakeholder communication plans are available and practiced.
Manage the security budget, vendor relationships, procurement of security tools and services, and ROI analysis to optimize spend while driving modernized tooling and automation.
Facilitate periodic security assessments, including internal and external penetration testing, red team exercises, and purple team engagements; own remediation tracking and validation of findings closure.
Champion security awareness and training programs across the company to reduce human risk vectors, track completion and efficacy, and tailor content for different audiences including executives, developers, and ops teams.
Ensure legal and regulatory coordination for incident notification requirements, breach reporting, and coordinated communications with privacy, legal, and public relations teams during escalations and investigations.
Continuously evaluate emerging technologies, cloud services, and evolving threat trends to recommend adoption, deprecation or architectural changes that improve long-term resilience and scalability.

Secondary Functions

Develop and maintain playbooks and runbooks for common incident types and escalations and provide hands-on subject matter guidance during exercises and real incidents.
Support security-related business initiatives such as M&A due diligence, product launches, and platform migrations by providing risk assessments and security gating decisions.
Maintain and update a catalog of critical assets and perform business impact analyses to prioritize security investments based on business context and risk appetite.
Contribute to the organization's vendor selection process by defining security requirements, participating in technical evaluations, and ensuring successful onboarding of security tools.
Mentor and upskill cross-functional security champions embedded within engineering teams to scale security practices and create distributed ownership.
Support continuous improvement initiatives by conducting tabletop exercises, lessons learned sessions, and maturity assessments (e.g., NIST CSF maturity mapping).
Coordinate with HR and legal on insider threat detection programs and response processes for personnel-related security incidents.
Assist in preparing briefings and training materials for Board and Executive leadership about security posture, trends, and strategic investments.
Participate in industry working groups, information-sharing communities, and conferences to keep the organization aligned with best practices and threat intelligence.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Incident Response & Forensics: Lead digital investigations, coordinate containment and remediation, perform root-cause analysis, and manage evidence handling and chain-of-custody procedures.
Security Operations: Manage SIEM/Log Management, EDR/XDR, IDS/IPS, network telemetry, and SOAR orchestration to deliver 24/7 detection and response.
Vulnerability Management & Pen Testing: Run vulnerability scanning programs, prioritize remediation, and coordinate external penetration tests and red team exercises.
Cloud Security: Design and enforce cloud security controls (AWS/Azure/GCP), secure cloud architectures, cloud-native logging, least-privilege IAM policies, and container/kubernetes security.
Identity & Access Management (IAM): Implement and govern authentication/authorization, MFA, SSO, RBAC, PAM, and periodic access reviews.
Security Architecture & Secure SDLC: Conduct architecture reviews, threat modeling, code review program integration, and security gating across development lifecycles.
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC): Map and maintain controls against NIST CSF, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA and regional privacy regulations; prepare for audits and attestations.
Data Protection & Encryption: Deploy DLP, encryption at rest/in transit, KMS practices, tokenization, and key rotation strategies.
Networking & System Hardening: Deep understanding of secure networking, segmentation, hardening standards, and secure configuration management.
Automation & Scripting: Automate detection, response, and remediation tasks using SOAR, Python, PowerShell, or other scripting tools.
Threat Intelligence & Hunting: Develop intel-driven detection strategies, adversary profiling, and proactive hunting playbooks.
Secure Tooling & Stack Evaluation: Evaluate, procure and tune security tools; perform ROI and implementation planning.
Audit & Reporting: Produce executive summary reports, dashboards, and evidence packages for compliance and audit stakeholders.
Forensics Tools & Methodologies: Familiarity with memory and disk forensics, chain of custody, and tools such as EnCase, FTK, Volatility.
Container & DevSecOps: Knowledge of IaC security (Terraform, CloudFormation), container scanning, image signing and pipeline security best practices.

Soft Skills

Strategic leadership with the ability to translate security risks into business decisions and investments.
Clear executive communication and board-level briefing experience, including presenting security metrics and risk scenarios.
Proven people leadership, coaching, and talent development skills—hiring, mentoring and performance management of security professionals.
Cross-functional collaboration: ability to partner across engineering, product, legal, compliance, and operations to achieve outcomes.
Strong problem solving and prioritization under pressure—effective decision making during incidents and time-boxed remediation windows.
Project management and execution discipline, with experience running complex cross-team initiatives and delivering against deadlines.
Influencing and negotiation skills to balance security needs with business requirements and vendor contracts.
Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to evaluate evolving threats, tools and regulatory changes.
Detail orientation combined with an ability to synthesize complex technical topics for non-technical audiences.
Mentorship and teaching capability to build security awareness and embed security practices into organizational culture.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Cybersecurity, Information Security, Computer Science, or MBA with technical background.
Professional certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CRISC, GIAC (GCIH, GCIA, GPEN), or cloud certs (AWS/GCP/Azure Security).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Cybersecurity
Computer Science
Information Systems
Network Engineering
Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12 years of progressive experience in information security roles, with at least 3–5 years in a management or team lead capacity.

Preferred: 7–12+ years with demonstrated experience running SOC/incident response, leading cross-functional security programs, hands-on technical background in cloud and on-prem security, and proven success managing compliance and audit engagements. Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, fintech) or fast-scaling technology companies is a plus.