Job Summary
Aprio is seeking a Program Manager to lead the operational program that keeps the firm's Cybersecurity Operations team running at its best. In this role, you will own the program infrastructure around daily defensive operations — including on-call coverage, alert-quality reviews, incident response coordination, vendor relationships, and executive reporting. You will partner closely with analysts, Detection Engineering, GRC, and external partners to ensure the team operates with consistency, accountability, and continuous improvement. This role sits at the center of how the Operations team plans, measures, and communicates its work.
What You'll Gain/ Impact
- Opportunity to build and mature a cybersecurity operations program at a high-growth professional services firm
- Direct influence on how the firm prepares for, responds to, and learns from security incidents
- Exposure to cross-functional collaboration across Cybersecurity, GRC, IT, Legal, and business leadership
- Ability to shape the workforce development of a growing analyst team through training matrix ownership
- A front-row seat to enterprise security operations, with meaningful impact on how the firm manages risk
Key Responsibilities
- Own the SOC operating cadence, including the on-call rotation, alert-quality review cycle, shift handoffs, and escalation paths; identify and resolve process drift early
- Coordinate live incidents by keeping the right people engaged, recording decisions in real time, and assigning and tracking follow-up actions — technical decisions remain with the incident lead
- Design, facilitate, and document quarterly tabletop exercises for the Operations team; support larger cross-functional exercises involving legal, IT, and business leaders
- Run structured post-incident reviews following significant incidents, using severity levels defined in the incident response plan, and ensure lessons feed back into playbooks and the detection backlog
- Produce monthly and quarterly Operations reports for leadership covering metrics such as MTTR, alert volume, true-positive rate, on-call load, incident frequency, and audit findings — presented so an executive can read them without a technical walkthrough
- Maintain the analyst training matrix mapped to NICE Workforce Framework work roles; track completion and keep it current as workforce evidence for audits
- Own day-to-day relationships with DFIR retainer firms, threat intelligence providers, and SIEM/EDR vendor account teams; manage SLA reviews and maintain renewal dates
- Provide Operations evidence to the GRC pod for client, vendor, and certification audits; map Operations activities to the controls that depend on them
- Maintain the annual, quarterly, and monthly Operations program calendar covering tabletop dates, audit windows, vendor reviews, training cycles, and on-call planning
- Coordinate cross-functional handoffs with Detection Engineering, GRC, IT Service Management, and the Identity team
Candidate Qualifications
- 3+ years in cybersecurity, IT GRC, or technical program management, or equivalent experience in a regulated industry with cybersecurity or GRC exposure
- Working knowledge of how a security operations team runs, including on-call rotations, alert-quality review, shift handoffs, and escalation paths
- Experience managing vendor relationships, ideally with DFIR retainer firms, threat intelligence providers, or security tooling vendors
- Strong written communication skills, including executive reports and post-incident review documents that hold up to audit and client review
- Experience coordinating people through incidents or other time-pressured situations without serving as the technical decision-maker
- Experience supporting audits by collecting evidence and mapping operational activities to control requirements
- Familiarity with at least one security or compliance framework (NIST CSF, NIST 800-171/53, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, CMMC, or similar) at an operating-program level
- Preferred Qualifcations:
- Experience running tabletop exercises or post-incident reviews with mixed technical and business audiences
- Familiarity with the NICE Workforce Framework, particularly mapping analyst training to NICE work roles
- One or more industry certifications such as PMP, CISM, CRISC, GCPM, or ITIL
- Experience with SOC tooling from the program side, such as SIEM dashboards, case-management reporting, and on-call platforms
- Experience in a professional services or accounting firm
- Experience building program routines while a security operations team is growing
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent experience
Aprio Chicago, Illinois, USA Office
35 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 690, Chicago, United States, 60601
Aprio Libertyville, Illinois, USA Office
736 Florsheim Dr Ste 10, Libertyville, United States, 60048
Aprio Schaumburg, Illinois, USA Office
1051 Perimeter Dr, 9th Floor, Schaumburg, United States, 60173
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