Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Intelligence Director

🎯 Role Definition

The Intelligence Director leads the enterprise intelligence function to produce timely, actionable, and decision-grade intelligence for executive leadership and operational teams. This role combines strategic program leadership, multi-source collection oversight (OSINT, HUMINT, SIGINT, GEOINT), analytic tradecraft governance, threat modeling, cross-functional stakeholder engagement, and program management of tools, data pipelines, and intelligence sharing. The Intelligence Director partners with C-suite executives, legal/compliance, security operations, product teams, and external partners (law enforcement, industry ISACs, government agencies) to reduce risk, inform strategy, and enable proactive mitigation of threats across the business.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Intelligence Analyst / Principal Analyst
Intelligence Manager / Threat Intelligence Manager
Military or government intelligence officer (O-5/O-6 equivalent)
Senior Cyber Threat or Security Operations Leader

Advancement To:

Chief Intelligence Officer / Head of Intelligence
Senior Vice President, Global Security or Risk
Chief Security Officer (CSO)
Executive Director, Enterprise Risk

Lateral Moves:

VP, Threat Intelligence or VP, Security Operations
Director, Cyber Threat Intelligence
Director, Corporate Security or Investigations
Director, Risk Management / Resilience

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the design, development, and execution of an enterprise intelligence strategy that aligns with corporate risk priorities, business objectives, and C-suite decision-making needs.
Build, manage, and mentor a multidisciplinary intelligence team of analysts, collectors, data scientists, and subject-matter experts to deliver high-quality, timely intelligence products and briefings.
Oversee multi-source collection programs (OSINT, HUMINT, SIGINT, GEOINT, commercial feeds) and ensure legal, ethical, and privacy-compliant collection practices across jurisdictions.
Establish analytic tradecraft standards, quality controls, and peer review processes to ensure intelligence outputs are bias-aware, reproducible, and defensible.
Drive proactive threat identification through threat modeling, red-teaming insights, adversary emulation, and identification of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK.
Develop and deliver executive-level intelligence briefings, board reports, and strategic risk assessments that directly inform go/no-go business decisions, M&A activity, and crisis response.
Integrate threat intelligence into security operations (SOC), incident response, and vulnerability management workflows to accelerate detection, containment, and remediation of threats.
Manage and evolve the intelligence tech stack—SIEM integrations, threat intel platforms (MISP, ThreatStream), TIPs, analytic toolchains, STIX/TAXII pipelines, and API-driven collection.
Lead cross-functional programs to operationalize intelligence across product security, fraud prevention, physical security, and supply chain risk functions.
Coordinate intelligence sharing and partnerships with industry Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), law enforcement, intelligence community contacts, and peer organizations to enhance situational awareness.
Maintain a prioritized intelligence collection plan and gap analysis; acquire third-party feeds and commercial intelligence services to fill critical coverage gaps.
Oversee the taxonomy, metadata, and data governance for intelligence artifacts to ensure discoverability, lineage, and secure sharing across stakeholders.
Implement metrics and KPIs (time-to-alert, false-positive rates, analytic throughput, executive satisfaction) to measure program effectiveness and drive continuous improvement.
Advise legal, privacy, and compliance teams on intelligence activities to ensure alignment with regulatory requirements, cross-border data transfer rules, and corporate policy.
Lead high-impact incident intelligence support during crises—managing briefings, hotwashes, attribution analysis, and post-incident reporting to senior leadership.
Plan and manage the intelligence budget, staffing forecasts, vendor contracts, and procurement of analytic/licensing tools to optimize ROI and scalability.
Drive the adoption of advanced analytics—NLP, machine learning, and automated enrichment pipelines—to scale detection of indicators of compromise (IOCs), actor behavior patterns, and emerging trends.
Conduct regular threat landscape reviews and horizon scanning to identify emergent risks (geopolitical, supply chain, technology) and recommend strategic mitigations.
Design and run training programs, playbooks, and tabletop exercises to improve organizational readiness, analytic rigor, and cross-team collaboration.
Produce written intelligence deliverables—daily/weekly threat summaries, targeted actor dossiers, risk assessments, playbooks, and actionable watchlists tailored to different audiences.
Ensure continuity and resiliency of intelligence operations through business continuity planning, redundancy of critical feeds, and disaster recovery procedures.
Advocate for intelligence-informed product and engineering decisions by translating threat realities into prioritized engineering tasks and risk tradeoffs.
Maintain subject-matter expertise in relevant industries, adversary motivations, cybercrime ecosystems, and geopolitical drivers that influence threat behavior.
Drive transparency and governance of sensitive intelligence content, enforcing role-based access controls, classification handling, and secure dissemination protocols.
Serve as the public-facing intelligence lead in select external engagements, conferences, industry working groups, and partner briefings when appropriate.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist in vendor evaluations and proof-of-concept trials for intelligence and analytics platforms.
Provide mentoring and career development pathways for junior analysts and rotating interns.
Participate in recruitment interviews, competency assessments, and performance calibration for the intelligence organization.
Support internal audit and regulatory requests for documentation of intelligence policies and decision records.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Threat intelligence program leadership and operations: development of collection plans, analytic production, and dissemination pipelines.
Cyber threat frameworks and tradecraft: MITRE ATT&CK, ATT&CK for Enterprise/ICS, Diamond Model, Kill Chain methodologies.
Threat intelligence platforms and formats: STIX/TAXII, MISP, OpenIOC, TAXII, and TIP integrations.
SIEM and security tooling experience (Splunk, QRadar, Elastic Stack, Azure Sentinel) and ability to operationalize intel into detection content.
OSINT toolset and methodologies: Maltego, Recorded Future, Shodan, Censys, social media collection, and dark web monitoring.
Data analysis and scripting: Python (Pandas, requests), SQL, data wrangling, enrichment pipelines, and automation.
Machine learning / NLP basics for intelligence: entity extraction, topic modeling, classification of indicators and actor behavior.
Incident response coordination and IR playbook execution; understanding of digital forensics, IOC lifecycles, and attribution challenges.
Risk frameworks and compliance: NIST CSF, ISO 27001, ISO 31000, and knowledge of data protection/privacy regulations impacting intelligence.
Geospatial and open-source analytic capabilities (GEOINT, ArcGIS, geolocation analysis) when relevant to physical and supply-chain threats.
Vendor and third-party feed management: evaluation, ingestion, normalization, and licensing considerations.
Secure data governance: role-based access control, encryption, secure sharing channels, and retention policies.

Soft Skills

Executive communication: ability to translate complex intelligence into concise, actionable recommendations for C-level and board audiences.
Strategic thinking with commercial orientation: balance long-term threat posture with pragmatic, business-focused mitigations.
Leadership and people management: hiring, coaching, performance management, and building high-performing analytic teams.
Stakeholder influence and cross-functional collaboration: work effectively across legal, product, engineering, operations, and external partners.
Judgment under uncertainty: make prioritized recommendations with incomplete data and rapidly evolving situations.
Project and program management: set milestones, manage budgets, and deliver against cross-organizational objectives.
Critical thinking and analytic rigor: structured analytic techniques, cognitive-bias mitigation, and clear sourcing/assumptions documentation.
Confidentiality and integrity: handle sensitive material with discretion and appropriate classification.
Teaching/presentation skills: run workshops, tabletop exercises, and training for non-technical audiences.
Adaptability and continuous learning mindset: keep pace with fast-changing adversary techniques and innovations in intelligence tooling.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Intelligence Studies, Security Studies, Political Science, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Intelligence Studies, International Security, Cybersecurity, Data Science, or an MBA with relevant experience.
Professional certifications such as CISSP, GIAC (GCTI), SANS, CISM, or industry-recognized intelligence certificates.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Intelligence Studies / Security Studies
International Relations / Political Science
Computer Science / Data Science / Analytics
Cybersecurity / Information Security
Criminal Justice / Investigations
Geopolitics / Area Studies

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

10+ years of progressive experience in intelligence, cyber threat intelligence, corporate security, or government/military intelligence roles.

Preferred:

12+ years with demonstrated leadership of intelligence teams, program ownership, and cross-functional influence.
Direct experience working with commercial threat intelligence platforms, SIEM/IR tooling, and managing multi-source collection programs.
Prior experience interacting with senior executives, external partners (law enforcement, ISACs), and influencing enterprise-level decisions.