Manager, Cybersecurity Operations Division of Information Technology

Minimum Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Minimum Experience

9

Summary

Oversees and directs the identification, prioritization, and delivery of work activities; development of efficient work processes; and oversight and management of other managers, staff, and contractors. Advises and leads others as they analyze trends and assess the impact of new and/or emerging technologies to recommend effective solutions for addressing customers’ business needs. Manages people and financial resources independently to ensure the development and/or implementation of high-quality technology solutions. Independently manages development of solutions at the best possible cost, aligning customer and business needs with vendor solutions as applicable, while establishing productive relationships with employees and key internal and external stakeholders. Conducts personnel management activities for their team, including recruiting, selection, performance management, training, and career development. Represents the Board and/or their division related to technical products, services, or solutions. Fosters a productive and positive work culture in alignment with Board values. Specialized duties and responsibilities may include one or more of the four following roles in addition to primary duties and responsibilities\: 1) Agile Methodologies; 2) Governance, Risk, & Strategy; 3) Architecture & Innovation; 4) Cybersecurity and Security Engineering; and 5) Cloud.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Directs, plans, develops, monitors, and/or leads highly complex activities, initiatives, solutions, or strategies. Mentors and oversees managers in their unit and/or division. Prioritizes the team’s work based on business needs, supports iterative planning, removes blockers, and promotes cross-functional collaboration in Agile environments.
• Consults and collaborates with clients, business partners, relevant stakeholders, and peers as a strong technical expert. Translates technical knowledge for stakeholders to understand and connect to their strategy and business needs. Briefs leaders on relevant technologies. Keeps abreast of industry trends through professional publications, internal research, training, and conferences. Provides client-oriented briefings on relevant technologies to the Board staff. Provides expert technical consulting services to Board and system personnel.
• Manages the team, independently, to develop, implement, administer, and/or maintain IT solutions.
• Oversees testing and evaluating new technologies to meet the business requirements of the Board. Champions the adoption and development of new technologies as needed.
• Develops requirements for outside contract work in coordination with senior leaders. Participates in procurement, selects contract personnel, and monitors performance to ensure timely delivery and quality. Oversees and maintains relationships with product and service suppliers. Manages data security and compliance risks.
• Contributes to, advises, and counsels leadership on strategic planning efforts by providing guidance and developing objectives and priorities. Translates priorities into solutions for their team. Champions strategic visioning with other leaders.
• Conducts regular reviews of the performance of unit staff and provides on-going counseling and development to build capabilities. Delivers meaningful performance appraisals and training to support current performance and future growth. Partners with senior leadership throughout the selection and hiring process, as needed. Implements succession planning by identifying future leaders and creating targeted development opportunities for team members.
• Prepares and monitors the team’s budget and operating plans and matches expenses to budget and income recovery. Provides justification for program activities, staffing levels, and operational enhancements. Maintains staffing, coverage, and expertise within the team. Provides annual operating expense estimates for existing or forecast projects. Acquires variances in budget to account for budget deviations.
• Represents the Board and/or division at conferences and meetings. Participates in and/or leads Federal Reserve System and interagency groups and teams. Serves as a senior leader to champion enterprise initiatives and new technologies to encourage adoption, implementation, and successful use. Partners with customers, Board-wide, and system-wide peers and leadership as representation for the Board and/or division.
• Serves as a change management leader. Fosters the adoption and/or implementation of new technologies. Promotes and exhibits change leadership capabilities. Implements organizational capabilities that allow the organization to be ready for and able to change. Provides change management processes, structures, and tools to support change.

Specialized IT Manager Work Activities (only for applicable roles) - In addition to the work described above, Information Technology Managers may also perform one or more of the following specialized roles:

Agile Methodologies

• Mentors others as they oversee product backlogs and sprint processes, including planning, task definition, execution, impediment removal, reviews, and retrospectives to maximize team effectiveness and delivery quality.
• Serves as an Agile coach by championing both Agile and project management disciplines, implementing appropriate frameworks, and fostering Agile values and mindsets across technical teams.
• Coaches and manages Product Owners and/or Product Managers to align short and long-term release planning, maintain execution-ready backlogs, and ensure effective communication between users/customers, business stakeholders and development teams.

Governance, Risk, and Strategy

• Advises, establishes, and maintains risk management frameworks that identify, assess, and mitigate enterprise-wide risks, while ensuring proper escalation protocols and fostering a culture of risk awareness across the organization.
• Champions compliance initiatives including SOX and FISMA requirements, regulatory mandates, and industry standards, providing strategic guidance to leadership and implementing continuous improvement processes for all governance activities.
• Oversees quality assurance programs for critical IT systems and applications, ensuring operational integrity through comprehensive testing protocols, auditing processes, and implementation of appropriate management controls.
• Independently develops and coordinates business continuity strategies and disaster recovery plans, collaborating with cross-functional teams to safeguard operations and aligns technical infrastructure with organizational goals and emerging technologies.

Architecture & Innovation

• Accountable for the development and implementation of enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks, ensuring comprehensive understanding of EA practices and principles to support strategic planning and effective operations across the organization.
• Oversees the advancement of business applications and technology solutions while managing integration programs that connect processes and systems across different divisions.
• Responsible for ensuring implemented services, products, and solutions are consistent with the architecture.

Cybersecurity & Security Engineering

• Mentors others through security incidents, conducts post-incident digital forensics, identifies root causes, and develops mitigation strategies to strengthen the organization's security posture.
• Oversees technical assessments of cybersecurity controls, reviews architecture designs, recommends risk mitigation solutions, and ensures implementation of effective security measures across infrastructure, data, network, and user access management.
• Prepares comprehensive security assessments for senior leadership and regulatory agencies, providing regular updates on cybersecurity health, risk environment, and/or emerging threats.
• Advises and partners with engineers, product managers, and business teams to integrate security early in development processes, break down organizational silos, and provide specialized cybersecurity expertise to support business objectives.

Cloud

• Directs strategy, solutioning, project planning, design, development, operations, and management of highly complex cloud computing solutions and systems having Boardwide or System-wide impacts, aligning with organizational needs. Establish, enhance, and align with efficiency, reliability, availability, and recovery standards while meeting security and compliance. Controls cloud utilization to remain within operating expenses budget.
• Independently drives innovation by making key technical decisions to improve enterprise cloud services, automation, and championing cloud technologies. Ensure cloud financial discipline and transparency, optimize cloud spend, manage vendors, and provide clear reporting.
• Provides mentoring to lower-graded managers in ensuring alignment with security, architecture, and enterprise standards by reviewing cloud systems for vulnerabilities and identifying opportunities to optimize resources for increased efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Serves as a strategic partner by providing expert guidance using deep knowledge of cloud computing architecture and engineering (e.g., automation, resource pooling, on-demand self-service, scalability, elasticity, security, cost management, optimizations, and serverless computing) to make recommendations, modify existing systems, and define technological needs for the Board or System.

FR-29 Minimal Qualifications

Requires a bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, cybersecurity or a related business technology field and nine  years of experience to include three years of management experience or equivalent experience.  Must have expert knowledge in at least one of the following areas\: cybersecurity fundamentals, cyber threat analysis, data science principles, digital forensics, incident handling, incident management, incident response, vulnerability analysis, automation and programming, project management, or programming practices and languages. Must be able to work effectively with staff. Must be familiar with relevant policies, procedures, and be able to work with TOP SECRET / SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION. Demonstrates strong technical management experience, preferably within government, financial services, regulatory, or research sectors. Demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of technology related activities, including cost/benefit analyses and industry standard software development lifecycles. Demonstrated evidence of expertise managing technical professionals and projects. Candidates should also have experience in handling cybersecurity incidents, coordinating response efforts, and working closely with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to minimize the impact of cyber threats. Candidates should also have familiarity with federal government regulations and standards, such as FISMA and standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Applicants are required to provide a writing sample of original work.

Remarks\: Working under supervision of the Assistant Director, the Cybersecurity Operations (Cyber Ops) Senior Manager is responsible for the Security Operations Center (SOC) with the mandate to defend the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the Board) from all cyber threats. The Cyber Ops Senior Manager leads and directs threat hunt, threat intelligence, detection engineering, incident response, insider risk, digital forensics, and vulnerability management. The Cyber Ops Senior Manager also leads mitigation and response operations, including containment, recovery, and after-action retrospectives. The incumbent of this supervisory position is responsible for staffing, training, and equipping a highly technical team while managing the unit’s budget, contracts and procurement actions to enable the protection of the Board.

Employees under the leadership of the Cyber Ops Senior Manager utilize cybersecurity tools such as firewalls, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, endpoint protection, and data analysis platforms as part of an integrated, defense in depth solution with a central Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system and security orchestration tools. As such, the Cyber Ops Senior Manager must possess expert understanding of system architectures, and the ability to identify security weaknesses that can be exploited to compromise a variety of systems used by the Board.

·         Manage the Board’s cybersecurity incident response process, ensuring prompt detection, containment, and remediation of cybersecurity incidents, as well as conducting post-incident analysis to identify areas for improvement.

·         Lead and direct instrumentation of cybersecurity tools such as firewalls, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, endpoint protection, and data analysis platforms as part of an integrated, defense in depth solution with a central SIEM system and security orchestration tools.

·         Lead and direct analysis of both classified and unclassified cyber threat intelligence from a variety of sources to understand the nature of the threat, extract the information that informs threat hunt operations, and ensure use of that information to investigate Board IT assets for evidence of an intrusion or compromise.

·         Lead and direct emulation of threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures in a controlled and/or production environment to demonstrate and observe the technical aspects of the emulated activity.

·         Lead and direct the development of cybersecurity tools that apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistical models, mathematical principles, and other analytic tradecraft to a variety of IT host and network-generated data for the purposes of identifying anomalous activity, suspicious network activity, and ultimately leads to the discovery of intrusions and/or compromises.

·         Lead and direct the implementation of vulnerability scans, analysis of vulnerability information, and ensure operational systems are adequately patched to protect the Board from potential cyber threat actors.

·         Collaborate with stakeholders and act as a liaison between the agency and other cybersecurity incident response teams to ensure effective communication and coordination on cybersecurity matters, share best practices, and stay informed of emerging threats and technologies.

·         Manage cybersecurity projects focused on developing and instrumenting highly complex, new, and innovative approaches to detect, prevent, and respond to cybersecurity intrusions and/or compromises.

·         Author documents and oversee the execution of project plans, schedules, requirements, risks, assumptions, cost, performance, and resource utilization.

·         Lead and direct the development of technical and analytical assessments to support information security engineering decisions to ensure Board information and systems are adequately protected. Able to oversee characterization and management of complex risks to mitigate cyber threats.

·         Develop technical products and present highly technical subjects to a variety of audiences ranging from non-technical senior leaders to highly technical subject matter experts.

·         Lead and direct collaboration with other cybersecurity professionals to develop and implement cybersecurity solutions that enable threat hunt activities.

·         Provide classified and unclassified executive briefings on threat activity, trending, and incident response.

Highly Desirable:

·         Familiarity with agile practices and ceremonies (e.g., Kanban, scrum, etc.).

·         Experience with artificial intelligence technologies and models, particularly in the area of cybersecurity operations and/or vulnerability management.

·         Demonstrated resourcefulness and advanced critical thinking skills to independently direct, analyze, and implement solutions for all the various complex problems that arise in the administrative and operations area.

·         Expert technical writing and communications skills. Contacts are often with division leadership, but also with staff at all levels; a significant degree of coordination and contact with other units/sections/divisions may also be required.

·         Ability to construct clear and concise written work and applies an increasingly advanced understanding of grammar, sentence structure, and intended audience(s) to the process of writing and editing such work.

·         Possess skills in negotiation and persuasion in performing duties and influencing support for change.

·         Three or more years of experience leading projects.

U.S. citizenship required.  Position is located in Washington DC, and on-site presence required.

The expected salary range for this role is $146,400 - $221,100. Final offers are determined by experience and education, as well as internal and external factors