Senior Cybersecurity Specialist

Bethesda, MD

Active Top-Secret Clearance with SCI and Polygraph Required

@Orchard is actively supporting a proposal expected to be awarded in Fall 2026 for a Maryland client in the Intelligence Sector. We are seeking individuals with the necessary skills, experience, and clearance to sign a letter of intent to join the team once the program is awarded. This is an exceptional opportunity to join one of our clients, a leader in the IC space with exceptional benefits and opportunities for advancement.

The Senior Cybersecurity Specialist provides technical and programmatic support to government teams by translating mission needs into technical requirements, managing those requirements, and shaping strategic program direction. Responsibilities include contract support (SOWs, RFPs, cost proposals), performance monitoring, stakeholder coordination, and communicating complex concepts through reports, meetings, and senior-level briefings. The team ensures projects stay on track by overseeing cost, schedule, and performance.

As the SETA-cleared Cybersecurity Specialist, you will be responsible for.

• Driving technical and operational effectiveness by evaluating cyber defense capabilities, conducting control assessments, identifying gaps, establishing metrics, and aligning with organizational security objectives.
• Leading continuous improvement initiatives through process analysis, architectural improvements, workflow optimization, and capability enhancement roadmaps.
• Enhancing incident response capabilities by designing procedures and playbooks, developing standardized approaches for different incident types, establishing escalation paths, and coordinating cross-functional response activities.
• Improving situational awareness through effective reporting templates, actionable security dashboards, real-time visibility mechanisms, and contextual intelligence distribution.
• Optimizing security tool usage by maximizing SIEM effectiveness, fine-tuning correlation rules, synthesizing multi-source data, ensuring system integration, and recommending enhancements.
• Implementing security automation by identifying suitable processes, designing workflows, developing scripts, implementing automated responses, and documenting procedures.
• Managing the security reporting lifecycle from data collection to distribution, ensuring timely delivery, implementing feedback mechanisms, establishing archival procedures, and meeting compliance requirements. 
• Fostering an agile security approach through methodologies like security sprints, retrospectives, iterative development, and balancing agility with compliance requirements. 
• Coordinating cross-functional security activities by serving as a liaison between teams, aligning initiatives with organizational goals, facilitating knowledge sharing, and building stakeholder relationships. 
• Leading security tool integration through architecture design, API implementation, data normalization, integration testing, and documentation. 
• Driving security data analytics by developing collection strategies, implementing advanced analytics, creating visualizations, designing KPIs, and leveraging data for decision-making. 
• Managing security automation development by establishing coding standards, ensuring proper testing, implementing change management, and documenting solutions.

Your experience and qualifications will need to include.

• US Citizen with an active Top-Secret clearance with SCI and Polygraph.
• A Bachelor’s degree with at least 6 years or a Master’s degree with at least 4 years of experience within the Intelligence Community. 
• Experience concentrating on the overall technical and operational effectiveness of capabilities.
• Experience providing recommendations on continuous improvement of the processes and architecture supporting the overall Cyber Defense operational activities, including, but not limited to, analysis, incident handling, and reporting products, and the reporting lifecycle.
• Experience providing effective incident response capabilities, usable and effective reports that address overall situational awareness.
• Experience maximizing the use of tools to correlate information and synthesize data into usable and actionable events.
• Experience in identifying and providing an agile approach to the automation of any manual or inefficient processes that exist across the cyber defense program.
• This role can be accommodated at several levels based on experience and qualifications, ranging from 4 to over 10 years of experience. Title and compensation will reflect the experience of each individual selected.

Compensation: As there are several potential levels for this skillset within the program, compensation can range between $120,000 and $225,000. All employees will receive a generous benefits package: Health, Dental, Vision, 401K with immediate vesting, tuition reimbursement, and generous PTO.

Established in 2010, @Orchard LLC has an exceptional reputation, providing staffing solutions to time-sensitive, talent scarcity issues to deliver better talent management ROI.  Our specialty lies in the critical area of program talent acquisition and resource management, not in one narrow skillset, but across many areas of technical and functional delivery. To learn more about our other exciting opportunities, visit our Jobs Page at www.atOrchard.com.