What are the responsibilities and job description for the Cybersecurity Principal Specialist position at United States Senate?
Cybersecurity Principal Specialist #5301
Target Hiring Range : $126,373-$155,000
Department : Chief Information Officer
Posting Date Range : 1 / 30 / 2025-2 / 13 / 2025
Pay Grade Range : $126372-$175868
Work Hours : 8 : 00am-5 : 00pm
FLSA Status : Exempt
Remote Work Status : Hybrid
Hybrid Schedule : 2-3 days a week onsite.
All remote or hybrid work arrangements must be performed from within the continental United States, subject to Sergeant at Arms approval.
This vacancy announcement closes at 7pm EST. Late applications will not be accepted.
JOB OVERVIEW
Job Description
The Target Salary Range for this position is : $126,373-$155,000
About Us
The Sergeant at Arms plays a crucial role in upholding the operational integrity of the Senate community. Our vision is to foster an environment of innovation, collaboration, and adaptability, ensuring uninterrupted legislative proceedings irrespective of time, place, or circumstance. The Cybersecurity department is responsible for protecting the systems and information used to create the legislation that underwrites our democracy. We create a resilient cybersecurity operation by pro-actively identifying, protecting, detecting, reacting, and recovering (IPDRR) the US Senate enterprise. We combine people, processes, and technology into a state of the art, continuous risk-reduction practice that is flexible, innovative, and effective
Role Overview
The role of the Hunt Principal Specialist is to be the subject matter expert for all technical analysis in the operations branch. They are responsible for leading proactive hunts based on advanced adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and for evaluating anomalous activity to determine its maliciousness. Additionally, they will serve as technical leads during incident response, write custom detections based on proactive hunts or threat intelligence, and emulate adversary actions to ensure the efficacy of network controls.
Key Responsibilities
As a Hunt Principal Specialist, your role is crucial in protecting our organization's digital assets and supporting our cybersecurity initiatives. Your key responsibilities include :
- Proactive Hunt -Use threat intelligence or anomaly analysis to identify potential adversary activity on the network that may have evaded current detections. Use the results of these hunts to either update detections or make recommendations to enhance Senate security posture.
- Detection Creation - Use technical expertise and understanding of adversary TTPs to create detections that address current gaps in our detection posture. Implement these detections in the network, host, and cloud environments and ensure their fidelity and usability.
- Incident Response - In the case of compromise, Hunt Principal Specialists will serve as the technical leads in incident response actions. They will ensure that Tier 1 and Tier 2 have correctly discovered the entire scope of the compromise and will undertake the most technical detection and response actions. Additionally, at the conclusion of the incident, they will ensure that the Senate detection posture can accurately alert of every stage of the compromise.
- Threat Emulation - Hunt Principal Specialists will be able to emulate the activity of advanced adversaries, ensuring that alerts fire, telemetry collection is sufficient to identify sophisticated threats, and discovering further gaps in our detections posture.
Key Accountabilities / Essential Job Duties
Provides functional and / or technical skills for the assigned cybersecurity unit. Supports the unit's work effort as required in preparing materials for collaborating with other sections, divisions, departments, and vendors to gather and disseminate information. Contributes to the unit's work effort as required in preparing analysis and materials for providing expert level support in the assigned area of cybersecurity to SAA IT security branch staff, other SAA technical staff, SAA procurement staff, and other division or departments; and for identifying and resolving critical and complex issues in the assigned unit. Supports the unit's work effort as directed in providing leadership to the unit's project teams and contractors. Work includes helping to develop plans, assignments, and coordination of work efforts. Supports the unit's work effort to develop governing policies, standards, and procedures. Other duties as assigned
JOB SPECIFICATIONS
Required Education
High School Diploma, GED, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.
Required Work Experience
As part of our hiring process, we may conduct a skills assessment to better understand an applicant's proficiency in key areas relevant to the role.
Desired Qualifications
We are seeking a candidate with basic knowledge in key areas of cybersecurity. The ideal candidate should have :
Working Conditions
Security Clearance
CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT
To be employed by a Senate employing office in a paid position in the continental United States an individual must :
3. Be (i) admitted as a refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157 or granted asylum under 8 U.S.C. § 1158 and (ii) have filed a declaration of intention to become a lawful permanent resident and then a citizen when eligible; or
4. Owe allegiance to the U.S. (i.e., qualify as a non-citizen U.S. national under federal law).
Employment is contingent on background / security investigation results.
BENEFITS AT-A-GLANCE
The SAA provides a highly competitive benefitspackage for all SAA staff. Our benefits extend beyond health care coverage tohelp provide employees with student loan reimbursement, professionaldevelopment, transportation subsidy, TSP / retirement savings, access to ourEmployee Assistance Program, and more! For more information regarding SAA'sbenefits, please visit
ACCOMMODATIONS
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, the SAA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAA and need special assistance or an accommodation to complete the application process, please submit your request to employment@saa.senate.gov email with "Accommodation" in the subject line.
VOLUNTARY SELF-IDENTIFICATION FOR VETERANS' PREFERENCE
If you are identifying as veterans' preference eligible underthe VEOA, please use this link to complete your application for Veterans' Preference AFTER you apply for this position. The link will also be available on the "Thank You" page after you have submitted your job application.
Candidates only need to apply one time for veterans' preference tobe considered for all future veterans' preference positions within the SenateSergeant at Arms.
To view additional information regarding the VEOA, please click here.
An applicantwho declines to self-identify as a disabled veteran and / or to provideinformation and documentation regarding his / her disabled veteran's status willnot be subjected to an adverse employment action, but the individual may beruled ineligible for veterans'preference.
Salary : $126,373 - $155,000
