Advanced Security Administrator — Infrastructure & Compliance

Lead Advanced Security Administrator### Overview

A Lead Advanced Security Administrator is a senior technical professional responsible for designing, implementing, and overseeing an organization’s security posture across networks, cloud environments, endpoints, identity systems, and applications. This role blends hands-on technical work with team leadership, strategy, and cross-functional coordination to reduce risk, enable secure operations, and ensure compliance with relevant standards.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and maintain enterprise security architecture, policies, standards, and procedures.
• Lead and mentor a team of security engineers and administrators; coordinate work across IT, DevOps, and application teams.
• Design, deploy, and manage advanced security controls: next‑generation firewalls, intrusion prevention/detection systems (IDS/IPS), secure web gateways, endpoint detection and response (EDR), extended detection and response (XDR), data loss prevention (DLP).
• Architect and enforce identity and access management (IAM) practices: single sign‑on (SSO), multifactor authentication (MFA), privileged access management (PAM), role‑based access control (RBAC), and conditional access policies.
• Secure cloud infrastructure (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) and implement cloud security controls: network segmentation, microsegmentation, cloud security posture management (CSPM), workload protection (CWPP), and secure CI/CD pipelines.
• Orchestrate vulnerability management: regular scanning, prioritization, remediation tracking, and metrics reporting.
• Manage incident response lifecycle: preparation, detection, containment, eradication, recovery, and post‑incident lessons learned.
• Oversee security monitoring and threat hunting using SIEM, log aggregation, and analytics; tune detection rules and automate playbooks.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks and standards (e.g., ISO 27001, NIST CSF, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR) and support audits.
• Engage in risk assessments, threat modeling, and third‑party/vendor security evaluations.
• Drive security awareness programs and influence secure development practices (DevSecOps).

Required technical skills

• Deep knowledge of network protocols, TCP/IP, DNS, routing, VLANs, and secure network design.
• Hands‑on experience with firewalls (NGFW), IDS/IPS, VPNs, proxies, and load balancers.
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their security services (e.g., IAM, KMS, VPC, Security Hub, Azure Defender).
• Experience deploying and tuning EDR/XDR, SIEM (Splunk, Elastic, QRadar), and SOAR platforms.
• Strong IAM, PAM, SSO, and MFA implementation experience.
• Scripting and automation skills (PowerShell, Bash, Python, Terraform, Ansible) for repeatable secure infrastructure.
• Vulnerability scanning and management tools (Nessus, Qualys, OpenVAS) and remediation workflows.
• Familiarity with container and orchestration security (Docker, Kubernetes, image scanning, runtime protection).
• Knowledge of cryptography fundamentals, PKI, and secure key management.
• Understanding of secure software development lifecycle (S-SDLC) and common application vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10).

Soft skills and leadership traits

• Strategic thinker who can translate business goals into security roadmaps.
• Strong communicator able to explain technical risk to non‑technical stakeholders and executives.
• Effective mentor and team builder; fosters collaboration across distributed teams.
• Decisive under pressure, especially during incident response.
• Continuous learner with curiosity about threat actor techniques and new defensive technologies.
• Project and vendor management skills to deliver security initiatives on time and on budget.

Typical deliverables and metrics

• Security architecture diagrams and policy documents.
• Incident response runbooks, tabletop exercise results, and post‑incident reports.
• Vulnerability reduction metrics (mean time to remediate), number of critical findings closed.
• Detection and response metrics: mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), number of incidents prevented.
• Compliance reports and audit evidence for relevant standards.
• Cloud security posture score improvements and drift remediation trends.
• Team performance: certifications, training completion, and on‑call readiness.

Career path and certifications

Common progression: Senior Security Administrator → Lead Advanced Security Administrator → Security Architect / Manager → Director of Security / CISO.
Valuable certifications:

• CISSP (security leadership and broad knowledge) — recommended
• CISM (management of information security)
• CCSP (cloud security)
• AWS/Azure/GCP security specialty certs
• OSCP, eJPT (offensive skills useful for defensive insight)
• GIAC certifications (GCIH, GCIA, GSEC)
• PMP or ITIL (for project/process leadership contexts)

Example job profile (concise)

The Lead Advanced Security Administrator will lead a team of security engineers to secure our hybrid cloud environment, develop detection use cases in the SIEM, manage identity and privileged access programs, and coordinate incident response. The role requires 7+ years of security operations experience, hands‑on cloud security, strong scripting/automation skills, and demonstrated leadership in security projects.

Best practices and recommendations

• Adopt a defense‑in‑depth approach with layered controls across identity, network, host, and application levels.
• Prioritize high‑risk assets and exposures using risk scoring rather than trying to fix everything at once.
• Automate repetitive tasks (patching, detection tuning, incident enrichment) to reduce human error and mean time to respond.
• Run regular red team/blue team exercises and tabletop simulations to validate controls and response playbooks.
• Embed security earlier in development (shift‑left) with automated testing, secure coding standards, and developer training.
• Maintain strong vendor and supply‑chain security governance; require security by design from third parties.

If you want, I can: provide a ready-to-post job description, write interview questions for this role, or draft a 90‑day onboarding plan for a new hire. Which would you like?