Threat & Vulnerability Specialist in Manchester

Janes empowers military, government, and defence leaders to act with confidence in an increasingly complex world. Our trusted defence, security, and geopolitical information delivered through seamless digital platforms and system integrations turns overwhelming data into clear, actionable intelligence and insight. By filling critical information gaps, Janes helps customers analyse threats, accelerate decisions, and stay ahead of emerging challenges.

We are seeking an experienced Threat and Vulnerability management specialist. They will be focused on the technical side of Information Security, ensuring IT systems are operated in a secure manner. They must have a strong background working with service providers and development teams using cloud-based technologies to support resolution of vulnerabilities and security risks. They must be able to support technical teams in implementation of solutions by breaking down complex problems and support prioritisation of issues.

You will be working as part of a team based in Manchester. You should be self-motivated, a natural problem solver, and used to operating independently.

How you will contribute at Janes:

• Conduct regular assessments to identify potential security threats and vulnerabilities and review the results in terms of risk and impact assessment.
• Own the scheduling of, and planning for specialist third-party vulnerability and penetration testing, in addition to the collation of reports.
• Ongoing enhancement of technical security controls.
• Helping embed better processes, standards, and ways of working.
• Ensure compliance with control objectives mapped in our standard (e.g., ISO/IEC 27001:2022, NIST, Cyber Essentials).
• Investigate security incident escalations from MSSP.
• Share knowledge, promote and coach standards and best practice.

The ideal skills and experience for this role are:

• Expertise in Microsoft Defender / Azure / Microsoft 365 & AWS Security controls.
• Experience with Tenable/Nessus or similar security assessment and Attack surface monitoring tools.
• Ability to demonstrate hands-on technical experience of conducting vulnerability scanning, evaluation of results and articulation of the risk vulnerabilities may pose.
• Knowledge of penetration testing techniques and tools would be advantageous.
• Experience of technical incident investigations would be beneficial.
• Working knowledge of industry standard information security practices.
• Excellent organisational skills with the ability to work to deadlines.
• Pragmatic approach to the administration of governance and risk.

Benefits:

• 27 days of annual leave.
• Healthy half (0.5 day leave every 6 months for wellbeing).
• Leave- study/ volunteer/ reserve forces.
• Pension plan (6% employer contribution).
• Private medical insurance – Bupa.
• Maternity (100% of basic salary for the first 26 weeks followed by Statutory Maternity Pay).
• Paternity (100% of basic salary for 6 weeks).
• Life cover.
• Access to LinkedIn Learning.

Our Mission:

Creating trusted open-source intelligence has always been our focus. Janes foundational defence intelligence, across military capabilities and order of battle, equipment, events, and defence industry, is verified and validated using our human-centric tradecraft to deliver the highest levels of assurance.

While open-source data is readily available to analysts and decision makers, it can be unmanageable in structure and volume, is not assured, and can be manipulated either intentionally or unintentionally. Janes open-source intelligence is verified and validated through our Tradecraft processes within our Single Intelligence Environment (SIE). Janes uses a multi-faceted approach to open-source intelligence, developed over 120 years, with all sources assessed for bias/objectivity, reliability, and level of certainty.

We excel at capturing and making sense of open-source information to regularly reveal new and timely insights. We provide clients with a definitive source of the 'what', the context to understand the 'why' and, particularly within our dedicated forecasting products, a prediction of what will happen in the future. Our news provides both a factual journal of record and commentary in order to add the necessary context behind the facts.

Our goal is to ensure our journalism and analysis is better, sharper, more relevant, more comprehensive, and more useful than other open-source providers. We achieve this through employing more than 250 analysts supported by many hundreds more freelance experts to source and verify information. Our experts are supported by technologies such as natural language processing, web scraping and monitoring, data visualization, and other analytical tool sets. A key value we provide is topic selection: deciphering what is salient, standing up the facts, and setting events into context.

Technology at Janes:

To support our Tradecraft we need the best technology solutions and capabilities, particularly in an increasingly complex world with exponentially accelerating volume of relevant information accessible. To respond to this challenge Janes has invested heavily in Technology, both in terms of people and software development.

Our vision is to operate a modern, commercially focused in-house Technology Team that is core to business success through effective partnering with Sales, Product, Research and Data teams to produce best in class OSINT data and product platforms that enable the mission.

We achieve this through our collaborative, supportive team oriented and delivery focused culture, utilising agile methodologies. Our technology group is comprised of cross-functional multi-disciplinary teams located across Croydon and Manchester.

Given the complexity of our data and Tradecraft processes we use a broad range of specialist technologies and approaches including AI, ML, graph and document databases, search platforms, serverless technologies and event processing platforms, customer portals, visualisation platforms, Geospatial systems as well as general purpose AWS platform capabilities.

Our world suits those who enjoy working within an empowered, disciplined development environment delivering complex solutions that require genuine problem solving and innovation. We are rightly proud of our culture which is reflected by our very high staff retention rate, which in turn reflects our friendly culture, interesting work, and the importance of our mission.