SECURITY OPERATIONS ENGINEER

Official employment notification has been announced for the critical appointment of SECURITY OPERATIONS ENGINEER on Senior Technical Grade / PPS-08 at National Security Operations Centre (SOC), Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA). This cybersecurity billet carries 2 Posts allocated on Open Merit to maintain 24/7/365 active cyber defense, threat hunting, and incident triage over Pakistan's national cyberspace and digital public infrastructure.

The daily operational purview of SECURITY OPERATIONS ENGINEER involves monitoring real-time enterprise SIEM and EDR alerts, investigating anomalous network traffic across national data centers, analyzing malware payloads, coordinating incident response through automated SOAR playbooks, and mitigating advanced persistent threat (APT) campaigns.

The candidate selection pathway comprises technical scrutiny of cybersecurity degrees and certifications, followed by a 100-mark written screening test covering network security, threat detection, and incident response, culminating in a technical viva voce before the PDA Cyber Selection Board.

• ✓24/7 Security Event Monitoring: Analyze real-time security alerts generated by SIEM (Splunk, Wazuh, QRadar) and EDR across national digital infrastructure.
• ✓Cyber Incident Triage & Response: Investigate potential security breaches, isolate compromised endpoints, and execute containment procedures following NIST SP 800-61.
• ✓Proactive Threat Hunting: Perform hypothesis-driven threat hunting across network telemetry and host event logs to identify stealthy adversarial activity.
• ✓Automated SOAR Playbook Development: Design, test, and maintain automated incident response playbooks to accelerate threat containment and remediation.
• ✓Digital Forensics & Malware Analysis: Extract and analyze malicious artifacts, memory dumps, and pcap files to determine attack vectors and root causes.
• ✓Threat Intelligence Integration: Ingest, correlate, and operationalize Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and threat feeds into detection rules (Sigma, Yara, Snort).

• 💡SIEM / EDR Architecture (Splunk, QRadar, Wazuh, CrowdStrike)
• 💡Threat Hunting & MITRE ATT&CK Framework Mapping
• 💡Incident Response Lifecycle & SOAR Automated Playbooks
• 💡Network Packet Analysis & Deep Traffic Inspection (Wireshark)
• 💡Malware Triage, Memory Forensics & Reverse Engineering
• 💡Detection Engineering (Sigma, Yara, Snort, Suricata Rules)

The Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) is an independent, autonomous federal statutory body established by the Government of Pakistan under the Ministry of Information Technology & Telecommunication to accelerate national digital transformation, foster a thriving digital economy, and establish a collaborative digital governance ecosystem. Headquartered at 5-A Constitution Avenue, Sector F-5/1, Islamabad, PDA serves as the principal architect of Pakistan's Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), driving secure, inclusive, and interoperable digital public service delivery.

With statutory mandates spanning National Cybersecurity Operations, Digital Identity, Data Protection, Cloud First policies, and Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP), PDA coordinates with public and private sector stakeholders to safeguard Pakistan's cyberspace, protect citizen privacy, and enable frictionless digital financial and administrative services across the nation.