Lead Security Assurance Engineer (Bristol)

hackajob is collaborating with Made Tech to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role. Made Tech helps UK government and public sector organisations build better digital services — and security is central to that mission. As a Lead Security Assurance Engineer in our Cyber practice, you'll be the most senior security assurance voice on client engagements, setting the technical direction for how organisations identify, assess, and respond to security risk.

You'll work across complex government programmes where the stakes are real: services that affect citizens, systems that hold sensitive data, and teams that need to move quickly without cutting corners. You'll be embedded in multidisciplinary teams, shaping how security assurance is woven into everyday engineering work — from threat modelling at design time to control testing in production. You'll build trusted relationships with client security teams, senior stakeholders, and government security communities, translating between technical findings and the risk decisions that senior leaders need to make.

You'll bring the judgement to know when a full ISO 27001 governance programme is appropriate and when a lighter-weight approach serves the engagement better. At Lead level, your impact extends beyond the immediate team. You'll establish assurance frameworks and standards across engagements, grow the security capability of the people around you — colleagues and client staff alike — and contribute to how Made Tech's Cyber practice develops as a community.

If you're someone who builds capability rather than gatekeeping decisions, who treats security as an engineering concern rather than a compliance exercise, and who cares about leaving client teams genuinely stronger than you found them, this role is for you.

• Establish risk-based assurance frameworks, coordinate audit programmes, and maintain living evidence of control effectiveness — feeding findings into vulnerability management backlogs and governance reporting rather than treating audits as point-in-time events.
• Lead vulnerability management as a programme, not a process. Define the prioritisation framework — drawing on EPSS, KEV, CVSS, and asset criticality — set remediation SLAs, own the risk-acceptance register, negotiate remediation plans with IT operations and product teams, and report programme KPIs (MTTR by severity, backlog age, coverage, recurrence rate) to senior stakeholders.
• Drive security into the team's normal rhythm. Embed threat modelling, secure code review, SAST, SCA, dependency policy, and container scanning into design and delivery cycles — making security a shared engineering responsibility rather than a specialist handover at the end of a sprint.
• Navigate UK government security standards with confidence. Apply the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework, GovAssure, Cyber Essentials, HMG Security Policy Framework, and relevant legislation (UK GDPR, NIS Regulations) proportionately across engagements — framing standards as guardrails that enable safe delivery, not barriers to it.
• Engage with government security communities and coordinate with departmental security teams.
• Communicate security risk in terms that drive decisions. Report security posture, audit findings, and vulnerability programme performance to senior client stakeholders — tailoring the frame for the audience, showing trends over time, and structuring reports around the decisions the reader needs to make, not just the findings.
• Drive adoption of incident response practices across engagements, own the IR-to-vulnerability-management feedback loop, and coordinate cross-team exercises including known-exploited-vulnerability scramble drills.
• Mentor colleagues across the practice and at client organisations, pair on complex or unfamiliar assurance work, and create structured development opportunities — including for client engineers who may not yet have strong security habits.
• Shape practice standards, contribute to hiring and calibration, build and share expertise externally, and help grow a security assurance community that raises capability across the organisation.

Hold one of the following — Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) — or an equivalent senior audit and assurance credential. Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) Certified Information Security Manager (CISM).

Experience establishing and operating vulnerability management programmes at organisational scale — including risk-based prioritisation using EPSS, KEV, and asset criticality, and managing remediation across multiple delivery teams. Evidence of leading compliance programmes against UK government frameworks — GovAssure, CAF, Cyber Essentials, HMG Security Policy Framework — in a complex multi-supplier or multi-team environment.

Experience conducting or coordinating security audits in UK public sector contexts, including producing formal findings and briefings for senior government stakeholders. Working knowledge of exposure management beyond CVE-only approaches — incorporating misconfiguration, identity exposure, and attack-path analysis using cloud-native tooling (AWS Inspector, GuardDuty, Security Hub, or equivalents).

Experience assessing and assuring supply chain security — including third-party and vendor risk — and integrating supplier risk into wider assurance and governance programmes. Experience building or shaping security assurance capability within a consultancy, programme delivery, or multi-client environment — including growing technical security skills in colleagues and client teams.

Evidence of acting as a trusted adviser to senior client stakeholders — anchoring security recommendations on client outcomes, challenging briefs constructively, and making security value visible rather than reporting activity. Experience setting team ways of working in iterative delivery environments — establishing retrospective cadences, collaborative problem-solving norms, and pairing practices that spread security knowledge across the team.

Familiarity with structured threat modelling approaches — STRIDE, MITRE ATT&CK, attack trees — and experience embedding these into agile delivery ceremonies. Experience integrating SAST, SCA, dependency scanning, and container security tooling into CI/CD pipelines as part of a shift-left security approach.

We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. 30 days Holiday — we offer 30 days of paid annual leave. Flexible Working Hours — we are flexible with what hours you work. Flexible Parental Leave — we offer flexible parental leave options. Remote Working — we offer part time remote working for all our staff. We offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice.

SC Eligibility: An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' UK residency and 5 years' employment history (or back to full-time education).