Senior Incident Response Analyst

**Position Is Contingent Upon Award**

Peraton Labs is hiring a Senior Incident Response Analyst to lead hands-on incident response for the Covered California and CalHEERS environments, own detection engineering and threat hunting, and serve as backup incident manager in coordination with the client's Information Security Officer and our Security Services Manager. You will carry the primary on-call rotation.

You will work with Covered California security leadership, infrastructure and application teams, our on-site security engineering and GRC colleagues, and an on-call digital forensics examiner. The goal is that incidents in a system holding the PII, PHI, and federal tax information of millions of Californians are detected early, contained fast, reported inside contractual and regulatory deadlines, and genuinely learned from.

What You Will Do In This Role:

• Lead incident response end to end. Own triage, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review, and serve as backup incident manager in coordination with the client Information Security Officer and the Security Services Manager.
• Build and exercise the playbooks. Develop and maintain incident response playbooks and runbooks, and exercise them through tabletop and functional drills.
• Own detection and monitoring. Drive SIEM and SOAR content development, log source onboarding, alert tuning, and detection engineering across cloud and on-premises telemetry.
• Hunt proactively. Conduct threat hunting mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and turn hunt findings into durable detections.
• Run defensible investigations. Coordinate evidence handling and chain of custody, communications, escalation, and reporting; produce post-incident reports and lessons-learned; engage the digital forensics examiner when a matter requires formal forensic examination or evidence for legal, HR, or privacy proceedings.
• Meet the contract's clock. Build and operate response procedures that satisfy the engagement's tight notification obligations, including notification within one hour when personnel no longer require system access, and the Privacy Addendum's breach-reporting timelines.
• Report to leadership and support adjacent work. Provide incident status and escalation reporting to security leadership on defined timelines, and support vulnerability management and logging and monitoring coordination.

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in cybersecurity or computer science. In lieu of a degree, an additional 4 years of relevant experience will be considered.
• 8+ years of cybersecurity experience with demonstrated hands-on incident response leadership.
• Active GCIH or GCIA certification.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise SIEM and SOAR platforms (for example Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel), including detection engineering, log source onboarding, and alert tuning.
• Demonstrated threat hunting experience using MITRE ATT&CK, plus malware triage and network and host forensics fundamentals.
• Demonstrated experience leading incidents as the incident lead or commander, including evidence handling, chain of custody, executive incident communication, and post-incident reporting.
• Working knowledge of NIST SP 800-61 incident handling practice within a NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 control context, and scripting ability for response and detection automation.
• US Citizenship and the abillity to pass a California criminal background clearance (Gov. Code §1043 / 10 CCR §6456) before starting work or accessing any confidential information, PII, PHI, federal tax information, or financial information.

Desired:

• GCFA certification. CISSP, GCED, or GNFA are also valued.
• Incident response experience in environments containing PII, PHI, and federal tax information.
• Experience in CMS-regulated environments or state health benefit exchange environments.
• Familiarity with ARC-AMPE and IRS Publication 1075 incident handling and reporting obligations.
• Experience in California state government or comparable public-sector environments.
• Experience coordinating with external forensic providers, law enforcement, and regulators during an incident.
• Experience building or maturing a detection engineering practice, including detection-as-code.