Senior Incident Response and Operations Lead

The Cloud & AI organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world.

Microsoft’s Cloud & AI organization is dedicated to securing digital platforms, devices, and cloud environments across regulated industries. We protect our internal estate and empower customers to operate securely in complex, multi-cloud environments. Our mission is grounded in innovation, collaboration, and a growth mindset, creating life-changing technologies that impact billions globally.

We are seeking a Senior Incident Response and Operations Lead to join our team. This role is central to Microsoft’s security posture, with a primary focus on leading incident response efforts and building a unified, cross-organizational incident response framework across critical domains such as Healthcare, Legal, and Human Resources.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

• Lead Major Security Incidents - Act as the primary incident commander for high-impact security events. Coordinate containment, eradication, and recovery efforts across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Develop Unified Response Frameworks - Architect and implement a cohesive incident response plan that spans multiple regulated domains. Align processes, escalation paths, and communication protocols across Healthcare, Legal, and HR systems.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration - Partner with stakeholders across engineering, compliance, legal, and HR to ensure consistent incident response standards, shared accountability, and effective governance.
• Automation & Process Optimization - Streamline incident response workflows through automation and integration with monitoring and alerting platforms. Focus on reducing detection and response times.
• Threat Modeling & Preparedness - Partner with threat modeling teams to identify potential abuse scenarios. Establish logging and telemetry standards to support rapid detection and investigation.
• Compliance & Audit Readiness - Ensure incident response processes meet regulatory requirements (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR). Lead tabletop exercises and maintain audit-ready documentation.
• Knowledge Sharing & Enablement – Create and maintain playbooks, runbooks, and training materials. Mentor engineers and business stakeholders on security standards and post-incident analysis

Embody our Culture and Values 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field OR 5+ years of experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), and operations incident response.
• 5+ years of  Extensive Incident Response Experience
• 5+ years of experience in Security Engineering, with demonstrated proficiency in security architecture, threat detection, and automation.

Other Requirements: 

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialize