Incident Coordinator/Cyber Incident Commander - US Federal

Workday•McLean, VA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role will support one or more direct or indirect contracts with the U.S. Federal Government which, due to federal government security requirements, mandates that all Workday personnel working on the contracts be United States citizens (naturalized or native). This critical role serves as the central point of command for all major cybersecurity incidents, outages, and customer-impacting events within Workday's highly regulated FedRAMP Moderate and IL4 environments. The Commander will lead the full incident lifecycle, from initial triage and containment through eradication and recovery. This involves making rapid, risk-based decisions under pressure, directing cross-functional responders (SOC, Engineering, SRE, Cloud teams), and driving resolution.

Requirements

Experience: 5–10 years in incident response, SOC, cybersecurity operations, or SRE/DevOps, including demonstrated experience leading complex incidents in cloud/SaaS environments.
Compliance Knowledge: Strong understanding of FedRAMP, DISA SRG, NIST 800-53 and IR best practices.
Technical Skills: Experience with EDR, SIEM, cloud forensics, and architectures (AWS/Azure/GCP, SaaS).
Core Competencies: Exceptional communication, crisis leadership, rapid triage, and the ability to remain calm and decisive under pressure.
Strong emotional intelligence and cross-cultural communication skills to manage diverse, high-stress teams.

Nice To Haves

Prior Incident Commander or CSIRT leadership experience.
Relevant certifications such as GCIH, GCIA, CISSP, or CCSP.
Experience supporting federal audits, 3PAOs, or highly regulated customer environments.
Proven ability to mentor junior team members and build long-term capabilities within the broader Security and Engineering organizations.

Responsibilities

Own all executive and customer communications.
Ensure incident handling strictly adheres to compliance frameworks including FedRAMP, DoD IL4/IL5, and NIST 800-53.
Support CISA/JAB/DISA/Customer notifications and customer evidence requests.
Maintain IR playbooks, escalation paths, and communication templates.
Direct cross-functional teams through triage, containment, eradication, and recovery.
Validate evidence collection and maintain chain-of-custody as required.
Provide accurate, timely status updates during ongoing or high-severity incidents.
Communicate effectively with executives, legal, GRC, customer success, and partner teams.
Act as primary Incident Commander, owning the incident bridge, assigning tasks, and ensuring rapid progression toward resolution.
Produce official Incident Reports e.g. RCA, maintain IR playbooks, and lead post-incident reviews and readiness exercises to ensure continuous improvement.
Systematically track incident metrics (MTTD, MTTR) and drive organizational adoption of best practices learned from incident reviews.