Senior Cybersecurity Engineer, Dubai

Our client is a PCI DSS Level 1 payment-orchestration platform operating across multiple regulated jurisdictions. We are looking for a senior cybersecurity engineer to take hands-on ownership of the company's cloud security posture, identity and access controls, and compliance evidence production, while serving as the primary escalation point for security incidents during business hours. This is not a SOC monitoring seat. The role requires someone who builds, owns and defends the security controls that protect a payments infrastructure in production, and who can stand in front of an auditor and walk through the evidence. The successful candidate will govern an outsourced managed detection and response service rather than sit inside one. There is a clear path from this role into leading the cybersecurity function. Key responsibilities: 1. Own and harden the company's cloud security posture in AWS: security group architecture, IAM policies, logging, network segmentation, secrets management and infrastructure-as-code security review. 2. Manage identity and access controls end to end: provisioning, RBAC, privileged access management, periodic access reviews and integration with the company's identity provider. 3. Produce and maintain the technical evidence base for PCI DSS (Requirements 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12), ISO 27001 and related frameworks. Work directly with the QSA and internal audit to close gaps and pass assessments. 4. Engineer, tune and administer the enterprise security stack: SIEM/XDR, EDR, email security, DLP, SASE/VPN, WAF and DDoS (Cloudflare). Maintain detection content, correlation rules and incident-response playbooks. 5. Serve as the senior in-house escalation point for security incidents: triage, containment, eradication, recovery, root-cause analysis and post-incident reporting. 6. Act as technical owner of the co-sourced MDR service providing out-of-hours coverage: maintain the escalation matrix, validate handoffs, oversee service quality and SLAs. 7. Author and maintain SOPs, runbooks and incident reports. Mentor operational staff and reduce single-point-of-failure risk across the function. Required experience: 1. 7+ years in cybersecurity engineering (not solely SOC operations or monitoring), including time in a senior or lead capacity. 2. Hands-on cloud security engineering in AWS: security architecture, IAM, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Config, Security Hub or equivalent. 3. Ownership of identity and access management in a regulated environment: provisioning, PAM, MFA, access reviews, audit evidence. 4. Direct experience implementing and evidencing controls under PCI DSS, ISO 27001, NIST CSF or CIS Benchmarks, including working with a QSA or external auditor. 5. Proven incident-response ownership across the full lifecycle, not just triage or escalation. 6. Background in banking, payments, fintech or another regulated financial-services environment. Required technical skills: 1. SIEM/XDR…