Principal Consultant - Incident Response

Circle Recruitment
London, United Kingdom
Last month
£65,000 – £85,000 pa

Salary

£65,000 – £85,000 pa

Job Type
Permanent
Work Location
Hybrid
Seniority
Lead
Education
Degree
Posted
23 Apr 2026 (Last month)

Benefits

Cash benefits

Principal Consultant - Incident Response
Salary: Up to £85,000 + cash benefits
Location: London, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham or Edinburgh
Working pattern: Hybrid - 2-3 days per week in the office

About the Role

Our client is seeking an experienced Principal Consultant to join their Incident Response practice. This is a senior, client-facing role within a highly regarded cyber security team, delivering proactive incident readiness engagements.

You will work closely with organisations to strengthen their preparedness. This includes reviewing and developing incident response plans, facilitating tabletop exercises, running simulated attack scenarios, and advising on preventative engineering and operational readiness. The focus is on ensuring clients are not only able to respond effectively in a crisis, but are proactively building resilience into their environments.

This role offers the opportunity to work on complex and high-profile cyber incidents, while also shaping how organisations think about planning, governance and technical response capability.

The Role

As a Principal Consultant, you will:

  • Lead and deliver technical incident response engagements, helping clients respond, remediate and recover from cyber security incidents.
  • Conduct high-quality forensic and technical analysis to determine root cause, scope and impact of security breaches.
  • Produce clear, well-structured outputs ranging from executive briefings to detailed technical investigation reports.
  • Act as the technical lead on small to medium-sized incidents, overseeing team members and ensuring technical excellence throughout delivery.
  • Support detection engineering and SecOps enhancement initiatives, including identifying coverage gaps in EDR/SIEM tooling and contributing to orchestration and automation playbooks.
  • Work directly with client technical teams, acting as a trusted advisor and primary point of contact during engagements.
  • Scope and design both emergency response and preparatory readiness engagements.

In addition to reactive incident work, you will:

  • Assess and improve clients' incident response plans and protocols.
  • Facilitate tabletop exercises and simulated attack scenarios to test organisational readiness.
  • Deliver incident preparedness services, including playbook development, runbook design and capability gap analysis.
  • Provide threat briefings and strategic guidance to help organisations strengthen their preventative and detection capabilities.
  • Mentor and develop junior consultants within the practice.

About You

Our client is looking for an experienced incident responder with strong technical depth and the ability to engage confidently with stakeholders at all levels.

You will have recent hands-on experience in at least two of the following areas:

  • Digital forensics and technical incident response
  • Enterprise security operations tooling and processes
  • Detection engineering within EDR/SIEM environments, including addressing ATT&CK TTP coverage gaps
  • Enterprise IT networks and Active Directory
  • Cloud platforms such as Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS or GCP

You will also demonstrate:

  • A strong understanding of threat actors and the techniques used to compromise organisations.
  • The ability to analyse complex technical problems and communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Experience leading investigations and managing client-facing engagements.
  • Familiarity with incident readiness and preparedness services, including tabletop exercises, playbook development and response planning.
  • The ability to build strong working relationships with clients and internal stakeholders.
  • A commitment to mentoring and developing others within the team.

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced incident response professional who enjoys both the intensity of live incident work and the strategic value of helping organisations strengthen their cyber resilience before an attack occurs.

Apply now for immediate review!

Principal Consultant Incident Response, Incident Response Manager, Principal Consultant Incident Response, Incident Response Consultant, Principal Consultant Incident Response, Incident Response, Principal Consultant Incident Response, Incident Readiness

Circle Recruitment is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy. Earn yourself a referral bonus if you refer somebody else who fills the role! We also offer an iPad if you refer a new client to us and we recruit for them.Follow us on Facebook - Circle Recruitment , Twitter - @Circle_Rec and LinkedIn - Circle Recruitment.

Related Jobs

View all jobs

Principal Consultant, Incident Preparedness

Palo Alto Networks United Kingdom
Remote

Principal Professional Services Engineer

Palo Alto Networks London, United Kingdom
Hybrid Clearance Required

Lead Cyber Security Consultant (Defence)

Sanderson South West England, United Kingdom
Hybrid Clearance Required

Principal Security Architect

Eden James Consulting Ltd London, United Kingdom
On-site Clearance Required

Principal Engineer (Microsoft)

Claranet Wc2E7Bb, WC2E 7BB, United Kingdom
On-site Clearance Required

Principal Cloud DevOps Engineer

Entrust London, United Kingdom
Hybrid

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

Where to Advertise Cyber Security Jobs in the UK (2026 Guide)

Where to advertise cyber security jobs UK in 2026: the specialist boards, communities and channels that reach offensive, defensive and GRC security talent. The candidate pool is small, heavily vetted and in high demand across government, financial services, critical national infrastructure and the private sector simultaneously. Many of the strongest candidates hold active security clearances, are not actively job-searching through general platforms, and move primarily through specialist networks and trusted referrals. General job boards reach a broad audience but lack the specificity that security professionals expect. Specialist platforms, government-affiliated channels and cleared candidate networks each serve a different part of the market. This guide, published by CybersecurityJobs.tech, covers where to advertise cyber security roles in the UK in 2026, how the main platforms compare, what employers should expect to pay, and what the data says about hiring across different role types.

Cyber Security Jobs UK 2026: What to Expect Over the Next 3 Years

Cyber Security Jobs UK 2026: roles, salaries and the threat intelligence, cloud security and zero-trust hiring trends shaping UK cyber careers. Cyber security is one of the few sectors where demand for talent has never once dipped. Every major technological shift of the past decade — cloud migration, remote working, AI adoption, the proliferation of connected devices — has expanded the attack surface that security professionals are expected to defend. And every expansion of that attack surface has generated more jobs. But the cyber security jobs market of 2026 is not simply a larger version of what it was three years ago. It is a structurally different market. The threats have evolved, the technologies used to combat them have changed, the regulatory environment has tightened considerably, and the roles being created reflect all of that. A job seeker who understands only the cyber security landscape of 2023 is already working with an outdated map. The candidates who will thrive over the next three years are those who understand where the sector is heading — which specialisms are attracting the most investment, which technologies are reshaping defensive and offensive security practice, and how the definition of a cyber security professional is broadening well beyond the traditional image of a network defender in a SOC. This article breaks down what the UK cyber security jobs market is likely to look like through to 2028 — covering the titles emerging right now, the technologies driving employer demand, the skills that will matter most, and how to position your career ahead of the curve.