Senior Cyber Security Analyst

Strategic Growth Partners provides both operations and strategic support to commercial organizations. Our client is a leading global professional services firm dedicated to helping organizations tackle their most complex business issues, maximize stakeholder value, and deliver sustainable change. Their Corporate Performance Improvement practice is looking for a Senior Cyber Security Analyst to support cyber security assessments, risk remediation, and security program transformation for clients navigating complex threat and regulatory environments, including federal and defense environments.

This role requires someone who has hands-on experience investigating, analyzing, and remediating security issues at scale — not just monitoring existing environments. This role supports the cyber and identity workstream leads. Workplace Type: 60% travel. Hybrid. Employment Type: Full-Time Clearance: Active Secret Clearance required; TS/SCI eligibility strongly preferred. Compensation: Hourly rate is DOE. Experience Should Include: - Security assessment support, including governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) frameworks such as NIST CSF, NIST SP 800-53, ISO 27001, CIS Controls, SOC 2, and the DoD Risk Management Framework (RMF), including authorization (ATO) packages. - Threat detection and incident response, including hands-on experience with SIEM/SOAR platforms, log analysis, and incident triage. - Vulnerability management and penetration testing support, including scanning, findings analysis, remediation tracking, and DISA STIG compliance. - Identity and access management (IAM), Zero Trust architecture, and privileged access management (PAM) concepts, including the DoD Zero Trust Strategy and Reference Architecture. - Cloud security posture across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP, including container and workload protection basics, plus DoD cloud impact levels (IL2 to IL6). - Regulatory and compliance exposure, including direct experience with DoD frameworks such as RMF, DISA STIGs, and the DoDI 8500 series.

This experience is a strong advantage and preferred for this role; HIPAA, PCI DSS, GLBA, or GDPR experience can substitute. - AI-driven security tooling, including baseline competency with AI-assisted threat detection and analysis tools. Candidates should articulate how AI accelerates security analysis and investigations. - Vendor and third-party risk review, including security questionnaires and control validation. - Supporting security awareness and phishing simulation programs, including content and metrics reporting. - Federal contracting experience. - Identity, credential, and access management (ICAM) for large enterprises, including PKI, CAC and derived credentials, and application onboarding to enterprise identity services. - Exposure to cyber sensing and analytics and to quantum-readiness (post-quantum cryptography) planning. - Continuous monitoring and continuous compliance, including Information Security Continuous Monitoring (NIST SP 800-137), the RMF Monitor step, and continuous Authorization to Operate (cATO), including Plan of Action and Milestones (POA&M) management and risk acceptance. - Automated compliance tooling, including GRC platforms such as eMASS, Xacta, ServiceNow GRC, or Archer; automated evidence collection; SCAP/OSCAL; and continuous scanning and configuration drift detection (e.g., Assured Compliance Assessment Solution (ACAS) and Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM)). - Compliance as code and DevSecOps, including policy-as-code and controls embedded in CI/CD pipelines and the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps approach.

Responsibilities: - Support cybersecurity assessments, including control gap analysis, evidence gathering, and remediation tracking. - Assist in designing security operations processes, including incident response playbooks and escalation procedures. - Assess Zero Trust and IAM readiness and support development of implementation roadmaps aligned with compliance timelines. - Analyze dependencies between security remediation and broader technology or cloud migration initiatives. - Support ICAM modernization, including onboarding backlog analysis and process streamlining. - Support readouts of in-flight cyber and identity programs, capturing leadership, resources, financials, schedules, and obstacles. - Build and support continuous control-monitoring programs, including control testing cadence, automated evidence collection, and compliance dashboards and KPIs tracking control effectiveness and audit readiness over time. - Support authorization maintenance, including POA&M lifecycle management, significant-change reviews, reauthorization triggers, and ongoing third-party assurance. - Contribute findings and analysis into A&M's broader engagement scope and deliverables. - Support practice development through internal knowledge sharing and content creation.

Qualifications: - 4+ years of professional experience in cybersecurity for complex, large enterprises, with consulting or advisory delivery experience a plus. - Demonstrated experience supporting security assessments, incident response engagements, or compliance remediation efforts. - Government or defense experience strongly preferred. Regulated industry experience in financial services or healthcare can substitute, and deep experience in other complex environments may also substitute. - Bachelor's degree required; Security+ (meets the DoD 8140 baseline), CySA+, GSEC, or equivalent certifications strongly preferred; CISSP, CISM, CAP, CISA, or CCSP is a plus. - Comfortable with travel up to 60%. - Active Secret Clearance required; TS/SCI eligibility strongly preferred. - U.S.

Citizenship and Residency required. What Distinguishes a Great Candidate: Has hands-on experience analyzing and remediating security issues at scale — not just monitoring existing tooling. Understands the dependency between security readiness and broader technology transformation success. Can work across security, infrastructure, and compliance teams. Brings AI-assisted security analysis into the delivery toolkit as standard practice.

Builds compliance that is sustained over time — continuous monitoring and automated evidence rather than point-in-time audits.