SOC Team Lead - 6-month contract (Inside IR35) - Hybrid, Central London - £550-700/day I am working with a global consultancy who have partnered up with a company in the financial sector, looking for a Senior SOC Team Lead to join their expanding team. Overview: Senior Tier 2/3 SOC lead to own complex investigations, run a small analyst team, and translate incident impact into business terms for senior stakeholders. Key responsibilities Triage, investigate and resolve true-positive incidents end-to-end. Lead and manage a small SOC analyst team (rostering, mentoring, performance feedback). Act as the senior escalation point and lead incident response for Tier-2/3 events. Produce clear incident summaries and brief senior stakeholders and business owners. Maintain and improve SOC runbooks, playbooks and triage guides. Drive detection tuning and use-case development; participate in post-incident reviews and lessons learned. Must have 5+ years SOC/IR experience with demonstrable true-positive case handling end-to-end. Proven team lead experience (mentoring, shift coordination, performance management). Strong communication skills and ability to explain technical incidents in business language. Experience in regulated/financial services environments is desirable. Nice to have Familiarity with EDR, SIEM and SOAR platforms (eg, Sentinel, Splunk, CrowdStrike). Experience improving SOC KPIs (MTTR, false positive rate, coverage).