Senior Cybersecurity Engineer – Dubai

About the role

Emerald Zebra Executive Search is recruiting a Senior Cybersecurity Engineer for a PCI DSS Level 1 payment‑orchestration platform based in Dubai. The role blends senior security‑operations ownership with hands‑on engineering of the enterprise security stack.

Key responsibilities

• Act as the L2/L3 escalation point during business hours and own incident response from triage through post‑incident review.
• Manage the co‑sourced Managed Detection & Response (MDR) service, maintaining escalation matrices, hand‑offs and SLA compliance for 24/7 coverage.
• Operate, tune and harden the security stack (SIEM/XDR, EDR, email security, DLP, SASE/VPN, WAF, DDoS) and maintain detection content, correlation rules and playbooks.
• Drive implementation and evidencing of PCI DSS technical controls (Req 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12) together with the Cybersecurity Lead and QSA.
• Investigate phishing, malware and anomalous behaviour, handle senior security tickets and support access reviews and audits.
• Author SOPs, runbooks and incident reports while mentoring staff to reduce single‑point‑of‑failure risk.

Required profile

• 7+ years of hands‑on cybersecurity, security operations or security engineering experience, including senior or lead roles.
• Proven experience implementing and evidencing PCI DSS (or ISO 27001, NIST CSF, CIS Benchmarks) controls.
• Full‑lifecycle incident‑response ownership.
• Experience working with or overseeing an MDR/managed SOC service.
• Degree in Computer Science, Information Security or equivalent practical experience.

Required skills

• Deep hands‑on SIEM/XDR and EDR operation and detection engineering.
• Administration of email security, DLP, SASE and VPN platforms.
• WAF, API security and DDoS mitigation.
• PCI DSS technical controls implementation.
• Incident response and forensic analysis.
• MDR/managed SOC governance and SLA oversight.