Manager - Security Engineer Vulnerability and External Attack Surface Management

The Security Engineer – Vulnerability & EASM (External Attack Surface Management) owns the end-to-end identification, prioritization, and remediation of vulnerabilities across MTN’s internal estate and external-facing attack surface. MTN Group’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) is strengthening its proactive defense capability

Beyond running the vulnerability management lifecycle, this is a forward-looking technical role that applies data analysis, threat intelligence, and emerging agentic-AI techniques to move the SOC from reactive patching to predictive, risk-driven exposure management.

Context

MTN's Ambition 2030 strategy is focused on leading digital solutions for Africa's progress by accelerating platform growth, advancing digital and financial inclusion, enabling sustainable connectivity, and building a resilient, future-fit organisation. As MTN continues its evolution into a digital platform business, Information Security plays a critical role in safeguarding customer trust, protecting digital services, enabling innovation, and ensuring operational resilience across MTN's diverse markets.

The Group Information Security function must therefore ensure the successful delivery of its mandate in the context of:

• Supporting MTN's Ambition 2030 vision to be the leading platform business and digital solutions provider for Africa.

• Accelerating digital transformation, cloud adoption, AI enablement, fintech expansion, digital services, and platform ecosystems across the Group.

• Protecting MTN's rapidly expanding digital assets, customer data, financial platforms, and critical technology infrastructure.

• Managing the geographic complexity of MTN's footprint across Africa and the Middle East, encompassing varying regulatory, political and cyber risk environments.

• Maintaining stakeholder confidence by meeting the expectations of customers, shareholders, regulators, partners, and communities.

• Enabling sustainable growth through secure digital innovation and the adoption of emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence.

• Achieving operational excellence through standardised security processes, automation, intelligence-led decision-making, and continuous improvement.

• Addressing an increasingly sophisticated and rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape targeting telecommunications operators, financial services, digital platforms, and critical infrastructure.

• Ensuring business continuity, cyber resilience, and operational stability across a highly interconnected technology ecosystem.

• Delivering integrated cyber defence capabilities across network, cloud, IT, digital, financial services, and enterprise environments.

• Strengthening proactive threat intelligence, threat hunting, detection, response, and cyber risk management capabilities.

• Supporting regulatory compliance and data protection requirements across multiple jurisdictions.

• Enhancing MTN's reputation as a trusted, secure, and responsible digital operator.

• Leveraging automation, machine learning, and AI-driven security capabilities to improve cyber defence effectiveness and operational efficiency.

• Embedding a culture of security awareness, accountability, and resilience across MTN Group and its Operating Companies.

In this environment, the Information Security function is required to provide timely, actionable, and business-relevant intelligence that enables MTN to anticipate emerging threats, proactively manage cyber risks, and support the achievement of Ambition 2030 objectives.

Values

We at MTN are a purpose and value-led organization. At MTN, we believe that understanding our people’s needs and aspirations is key to creating experiences that delight you at work, everyday. We are committed to fostering an environment where every member of our Y’ello Family is heard, understood and empowered to live an inspired life.

Our values keep us grounded and moving in the right direction. Most importantly, they keep us honest. It is not something we claim to be. It is in our DNA.

As an organisation, we consider it our mission to create an exciting and rewarding place to work, where our people can be themselves, thrive in positivity and ignite their full potential. A workplace that boosts creativity and innovation, improves productivity, and ultimately drives meaningful results. A workplace that is built on relationships and achieving a purpose that is bigger than us.

Our commitments go beyond an organisational promise. It is in our leadership and managerial ethos to meaningfully partner with our employees, customers and stakeholders with a vision to realise our shared goals.

Live Y’ello

• Lead with Care

• Can-do with Integrity

• Collaborate with Agility

• Serve with Respect

• Act with Inclusion

The Security Engineer – Vulnerability & EASM (External Attack Surface Management) will be responsible for the following:

Vulnerability Management (core)

• Manage the vulnerability management lifecycle – discovery, validation, prioritization, remediation tracking and verification – across infrastructure, cloud, applications and telecom/OT assets.

• Operate and tune enterprise vulnerability scanning platforms (e.g., Tenable, Qualys), ensuring complete and accurate asset coverage.

• Define and enforce risk-based remediation SLAs; partner with infrastructure, application and platform teams to drive closure.

• Maintain authoritative vulnerability and asset inventories, reducing false positives through validation and contextual enrichment.

External Attack Surface Management (EASM)

• Continuously discover, map and monitor MTN’s internet-facing assets – including shadow IT, exposed services, certificates, domains and cloud footprints.

• Operate EASM tooling (e.g., Microsoft Defender EASM, Shodan) to surface exposure before adversaries do.

• Correlate external exposure with internal vulnerability and threat data to produce a unified, prioritized view of organizational risk.

• Drive rapid remediation of high-risk external exposures and unauthorized or unmanaged assets.

Practical Risk & Remediation

• Translate technical findings into business risk – prioritizing by exploitability (CVSS, EPSS, CISA KEV), asset criticality and threat context, not raw vulnerability counts.

• Recommend pragmatic, achievable remediation and compensating controls; avoid unmanageable “boil-the-ocean” backlogs.

• Lead targeted remediation campaigns and track measurable reductions in exploitable risk over time.

Threat Analysis & Forward-Looking Defence

• Integrate threat intelligence to contextualize vulnerabilities against active exploitation and threat-actor behavior.

• Anticipate emerging exposure – new CVEs, attack techniques, supply-chain and cloud risks – and proactively assess MTN’s susceptibility.

• Contribute to detection, hardening and resilience improvements informed by attacker tradecraft (MITRE ATT&CK).

AI-Driven Innovation & Thought Leadership

• Pioneer the use of agentic AI and large-language-model platforms (e.g., Anthropic Claude / Claude Code or equivalent) to automate vulnerability triage, enrichment, remediation guidance and reporting.

• Design and prototype AI-assisted workflows that scale VM and EASM operations across MTN’s Group markets.

• Stay ahead of developments in AI, offensive tooling and exposure management, bringing best practice into the team

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, Engineering or a related field – or equivalent practical experience.

• 6+ years in information security, with at least 3–4 years dedicated to vulnerability management and/or attack surface management.

• Demonstrable experience operating enterprise VM and EASM tooling at scale.

• Hands-on scripting/automation (Python, PowerShell) and data analysis capability.

• Proven track record of driving measurable risk-reduction and remediation outcomes.

• Exposure to AI / agentic-AI tooling applied to security operations – strongly preferred

Preferred Certifications:

• OSCP, GIAC (e.g., GWAPT, GEVA, GCTI), CISSP, CEH or equivalent.

• Cloud security certifications (e.g., AZ-500, AWS Security Specialty, CCSP).

Technical Skills & Tools:

• Vulnerability management: Tenable / Qualys or equivalent.

• Attack surface management: Microsoft Defender EASM / Shodan or equivalent.

• Prioritization frameworks: CVSS, EPSS, CISA KEV.

• Threat frameworks: MITRE ATT&CK; threat-intelligence integration.

• Cloud security: Azure / AWS / GCP exposure management.

• Data & automation: Python, SQL, Power BI, SOAR / workflow automation.

• AI: agentic-AI / LLM platforms (Anthropic Claude / Claude Code or equivalent); prompt and workflow design.

Behavioural Competencies:

• Forward-thinking and curious – anticipates rather than reacts.

• Strong communicator who translates technical risk for non-technical audiences.

• Pragmatic problem-solver focused on real-world, achievable remediation.

• Collaborative, with the credibility to influence across teams and markets.

• Self-driven thought leader who raises the capability of those around them.