Senior Security Engineer

Phorest is a product-led SaaS company building software for the hair, beauty, wellness and MedSpa industries. What started in 2002 as a simple text-reminder tool has grown into a global platform supporting over 155,000 professionals worldwide, helping businesses manage everything from bookings and payments to marketing, customer engagement and business growth. We're passionate about building technology that makes a real difference to the businesses we serve. As we continue to grow, we're investing in the people, platforms and security capabilities that will help us scale sustainably. We're also a Certified B Corp, and something that makes Phorest a little different is that 25% of our business is owned by our employees.

The Opportunity

We're looking for an experienced Senior Security Engineer to help shape how security is built, understood and embedded across Phorest. This isn't a role focused solely on responding to alerts, managing tickets or reviewing what other teams have built. We're looking for someone who enjoys getting hands-on, solving complex problems and making security easier for engineering teams to get right. You'll work closely with our Product, Engineering, Platform and Security teams to build scalable security tooling, strengthen our cloud and application security practices, and help engineers make confident security decisions. A big part of your impact will be moving us from reactive security work towards a more proactive, security-by-design approach. You'll have the autonomy to identify opportunities, challenge existing ways of working and take ownership of improvements that make a meaningful difference. Just as importantly, you'll be someone who enjoys sharing knowledge, building relationships and helping others develop their security capabilities.

What You'll Be Doing

• Building Security into Our Engineering Platforms: Partner with Engineering and Platform teams to build security into our development workflows, CI/CD pipelines and AWS environment. Design and introduce tooling, automation and reusable security practices that help engineers build securely without unnecessary friction. Identify opportunities to improve our cloud and application security posture, taking ownership of meaningful improvements from idea through to delivery. Help establish secure-by-default approaches that can scale as our products and engineering teams grow.
• Enabling and Empowering Engineering Teams: Work closely with Product and Engineering teams throughout the development lifecycle, providing practical security guidance from early design through to launch. Lead collaborative threat-modelling sessions, architecture reviews and hands-on security discussions. Build security knowledge and confidence across Engineering through coaching, pairing, documentation and knowledge sharing. Act as a trusted security partner, translating complex risks and requirements into clear, actionable guidance. Help create a culture where security is something teams feel confident owning, rather than something that's simply reviewed at the end.
• Strengthening Our Security Posture: Proactively identify emerging threats, vulnerabilities and security risks across our SaaS platform and cloud infrastructure. Work with the wider Security and IT teams to improve monitoring, detection and response capabilities. Help shape and prioritise security improvements based on real business and technical risks. Develop and enhance security practices for our AWS-hosted, multi-tenant SaaS environment. Support security incident response, including investigation, containment, remediation and learning from incidents. Participate in our security on-call rota, helping us respond effectively when incidents arise.

What We're Looking For

• Strong experience in Security Engineering, Application Security or a closely related discipline, ideally with 7+ years of relevant experience.
• A background in software development, including experience writing production code and understanding the challenges engineers face.
• Solid knowledge of AWS security and services such as IAM, GuardDuty, Security Hub and WAF.
• Experience embedding security into modern development practices, including CI/CD, secure coding and the software development lifecycle.
• A strong understanding of common vulnerabilities, OWASP principles and secure engineering practices.
• Experience working with SaaS platforms, ideally within cloud-native or multi-tenant environments.
• An interest in using AI tools to accelerate security engineering, with the judgement to evaluate their outputs and apply them responsibly.

Even Better If You Have...

• Experience in payments, financial services or regulated SaaS environments, including PCI DSS, GDPR or HIPAA.
• Familiarity with Team Topologies or enabling/platform team models.
• Exposure to penetration testing, offensive security, red teaming or bug bounty programmes.
• Experience building security champion programmes or initiatives that help engineering teams take greater ownership of security.

Why Join Phorest?

At Phorest, we want our people to do meaningful work, continue developing their skills and have the flexibility and support to enjoy life outside work too. Here's a flavour of what we offer:

• Flexibility: A remote-first working environment with flexibility to support your work-life balance.
• Wellbeing: Private healthcare, two Wellness Days, an Employee Assistance Programme and access to an online GP service.
• Financial wellbeing: Competitive compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, pension, life assurance and income protection.
• Learning and development: Opportunities to grow your career through development programmes, knowledge sharing and LinkedIn Learning.
• Family support: Enhanced maternity and paternity benefits, alongside additional leave supporting fertility treatment, pregnancy loss and menopause.

If this role sounds like something you'd enjoy and you feel you could bring value to our team, we'd encourage you to apply. Phorest is an equal opportunities employer. We're committed to building an inclusive workplace where everyone can do their best work.