OT Incident Response Analyst

Role: OT Incident Response

Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Role Summary

The OT SOC L3 Analyst is the senior technical authority within the OT SOC, responsible for advanced threat hunting, OT aware digital forensics and incident response (DFIR), detection engineering, and mentoring of L1/L2 analysts. The role leads the response to complex and high-severity OT incidents, develops the SOC's OT detection capability, and serves as the escalation point and subject matter expert for industrial threat scenarios. The analyst translates OT threat intelligence into actionable detections and drives continuous improvement of the SOC's OT defenses.

Responsibilities

• Lead investigation and response for complex, high severity and suspected targeted attacks against OT/ICS environments.
• Perform proactive, hypothesis-driven threat hunting across OT networks and assets; design and run hunt campaigns.
• Conduct OT aware DFIR forensic acquisition and analysis of ICS hosts, engineering workstations, HMIs, controllers and network captures using methods that preserve process safety and evidence integrity.
• Design, build and tune detection content and correlation rules; own the detection engineering lifecycle for the OT SOC.
• Operationalize OT threat intelligence (e.g., threat groups such as ELECTRUM/Sandworm and XENOTIME; malware such as TRITON/TRISIS, Industroyer and PIPEDREAM) and map it to detections via MITRE ATT&CK for ICS.
• Define, document and continuously improve OT incident-response playbooks and runbooks.
• Serve as senior escalation point and mentor for L1/L2 analysts; provide technical coaching and quality review of investigations.
• Lead and support OT tabletop exercises and purple team / adversary-emulation activities.
• Advise on OT network architecture, segmentation and monitoring placement to close detection gaps.
• Produce executive and technical incident reports; brief stakeholders on root cause, impact and remediation.
• Support compliance, audit and regulatory reporting aligned to NCA OTCC-1:2022, ECC and ISA/IEC 62443, including incident-notification expectations to the NCA.

Qualifications

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer/Electrical/Instrumentation Engineering or a related field (Master's a plus).
• 6–10+ years of cybersecurity experience, with a minimum of 4 years in OT/ICS security operations, DFIR or threat hunting.
• Deep expertise in OT protocols and ICS architectures (DCS, SCADA, PLC, SIS) and the Purdue model.
• Proven experience leading OT/ICS incident response and forensic investigations.
• Strong command of OT monitoring platforms (Nozomi, Claroty, Dragos, Tenable OT, Defender for IoT) and SIEM detection engineering (Splunk, QRadar, Sentinel).
• Advanced working knowledge of MITRE ATT&CK for ICS, NIST SP 800-82, ISA/IEC 62443 and NCA OTCC.

Preferred Certifications

GRID, GCIP, GICSP, GCFA or GREM (GIAC) strongly preferred • Vendor expert-level certifications (Dragos, Claroty, Nozomi).

Skills & Attributes

• Expert analytical, forensic and reverse-engineering / malware-analysis aptitude in an OT context.
• Strong leadership, mentoring and stakeholder-management skills.
• Sound judgment in balancing cybersecurity response against process safety and operational availability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English; Arabic strongly preferred for regulator and executive engagement.
• Available for on-call escalation and incident leadership outside normal hours.