Senior Associate/Cybersecurity Consultant Due Diligence Advisory (Forensic Services practice)

About Charles River Associates

CRA is a leading global consulting firm that provides independent economic and financial analysis behind litigation matters, guides businesses through critical strategy and operational issues to become more profitable, and advises governments on the economic impact of policies and regulations. Our two main services – economic and management consulting – are delivered by practice groups that focus on specific areas of expertise or industries. Click here to learn how CRA can help you launch your career.

Position Overview

CRA’s Forensic Services practice supports companies’ commitment to integrity by assisting them and their counsel in independently responding to allegations of fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and non-compliance. We are noted for deploying cross-trained teams of forensic professionals to assist our clients in gaining deeper insights and greater value more quickly. We provide accounting and forensic services as well as cybercrime investigation services.

CRA is seeking a Cybersecurity Consultant (Assessments / Due Diligence / Advisory) to support client engagements focused on evaluating and managing cybersecurity risk. In this role, you will lead and participate in client-facing assessments, including interviews, workshops, and executive readouts, while operating with a high degree of independence and confidence.

You will be responsible for translating client discussions into clearly defined engagement scopes and Statements of Work (SOWs), aligning deliverables with frameworks such as the NIST CSF and transaction-specific objectives. This includes the ability to assess cybersecurity posture in transaction and investment contexts, distinguish material risks from broader program maturity gaps, and tailor findings to the needs of private equity, legal, and executive stakeholders. The role includes executing cyber due diligence and proactive security assessments through documentation review, stakeholder interviews, and control evaluation. The role may also support incident readiness reviews, tabletop exercises, and broader cyber resilience assessments to help clients evaluate preparedness, decision-making, and recovery capabilities before or after a cyber event. The role will also work closely with CRA’s incident response team to identify recurring risk themes and control gaps from active and recently closed matters, and help translate those observations into follow-on proactive engagements including gap assessments, tabletop exercises, resilience reviews, and broader security uplift efforts.

This position requires producing high-quality, client-ready reports that include prioritized findings, risk-based recommendations, and executive-level summaries. You will also support senior team members in proposal development and business development efforts, while bridging technical cybersecurity findings into clear business risk narratives for legal, private equity, and executive audiences. You will also contribute to the development of repeatable assessment methodologies, templates, and client-facing deliverables across CRA’s proactive cybersecurity service offerings.

The ideal candidate demonstrates a strong advisory mindset, the ability to independently manage client conversations, and the capability to connect multiple cybersecurity domains—including identity and access management, endpoint security, vulnerability management, backup and recovery, email security, and asset management—into a cohesive and defensible security program assessment. The ideal candidate should also be able to translate technical observations into clear business, legal, and transaction-oriented risk narratives for executive and client stakeholders.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience:

• Approximately 5–7 years of experience in cybersecurity consulting, advisory, or due diligence
• Experience supporting cyber resilience assessments, incident readiness reviews, tabletop exercises, or related preparedness-focused engagements is a plus.
• Experience collaborating with incident response, forensic, or crisis management teams to translate post-incident observations into proactive assessment, readiness, or remediation-focused engagements is a plus.

• Client Presence & Communication:

• Comfortable leading discussions with CIOs, IT Directors, and legal stakeholders
• Strong ability to guide conversations, ask structured questions, and manage meetings effectively
• Excellent executive communication skills with clear, concise, and unambiguous delivery

• Scoping & Advisory Skills:

• Experience drafting or contributing to Statements of Work (SOWs), engagement letters, and proposals
• Ability to translate loosely defined client needs into structured deliverables and timelines
• Strong commercial awareness, including understanding scope boundaries and identifying opportunities to expand engagements
• Ability to tailor scopes and findings to transaction, diligence, or investment-focused objectives, including identifying issues that are likely to be material to legal, private equity, or executive decision-makers.

• Report Writing:

• Impeccable written communication skills, including grammar, structure, and formatting
• Ability to produce logically consistent, defensible findings and recommendations
• Experience delivering polished, client-ready cybersecurity risk reports
• Ability to prioritize findings based on business impact, articulate critical versus lower-priority issues, and develop executive-ready narratives that support practical decision-making.

• Cybersecurity Frameworks:

• NIST Cybersecurity Framework (primary)
• Supporting frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and HITRUST

• Strong working knowledge of:
• Ability to map controls, identify gaps, and translate findings into business risk and impact
• Ability to evaluate how controls operate together across governance, identity, endpoint, cloud, recovery, and monitoring layers as part of a broader security program or resilience assessment.

• Technical & Domain Knowledge:

• Identity & Access Management (e.g., Active Directory, Entra ID)
• Endpoint security (e.g., EDR/MDR solutions such as CrowdStrike)
• Vulnerability management tools (e.g., Tenable, Qualys)
• Backup and recovery strategies (RTO/RPO, immutability)
• Email security (phishing protection, DMARC, MFA)
• Asset inventory, device management, and patch lifecycle practices
• Comfort reviewing supporting documentation such as security policies and standards, architecture diagrams,