Security Engineering Lead in Bristol

An established and highly regarded financial services organisation is seeking a Security Engineering Lead to play a pivotal role in strengthening security controls, risk management, and remediation across a major technology transformation programme. This large-scale initiative is expected to run for 3-5 years, offering the successful candidate significant technical exposure, long-term impact, and strong opportunities for career progression within a growing security function.

This is a hands-on, player-manager role, ideal for someone who enjoys remaining technically involved while also leading, mentoring, and shaping a high-performing security engineering team. You will work closely with one of the organisation's flagship transformation programmes, partnering with engineering, platform, and security stakeholders to define and deliver a forward-looking security engineering strategy and roadmap.

The Role

As Security Engineering Lead, you will combine technical leadership with delivery, ensuring security is embedded across platforms, infrastructure, and the software development life cycle.

• Team Leadership & Collaboration
  • Lead, mentor, and develop a team of security engineers, fostering a collaborative, high-performance culture.
  • Take a pragmatic, risk-based approach to embedding security controls across engineering and delivery teams.
  • Build strong relationships with engineering, platform, architecture, and product teams to deliver practical, scalable security solutions.
  • Set priorities for the security engineering function, ensuring services deliver measurable value and align with organisational risk appetite.
• Security Engineering & Technical Leadership
  • Act as a technical authority across security engineering, covering areas such as application, cloud, infrastructure, and platform security.
  • Drive the integration of security controls into CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments.
  • Own and evolve security tooling, including vulnerability management, detection, and DevSecOps capabilities (e.g., SAST, DAST, SCA, container and cloud security tooling).
  • Define and implement secure engineering standards, including secure coding, infrastructure-as-code security, and threat modelling practices.
  • Partner with Vulnerability Management and broader security teams to ensure effective identification, prioritisation, and remediation of risks in line with agreed SLAs.
  • Support the organisation's transition to modern, cloud-native and platform-based architectures with robust, scalable security controls.

About You

We’re looking for an experienced security engineering professional with a strong technical foundation and proven leadership capability. You will bring:

• Experience in a Security Engineering Lead, Senior Security Engineer, or similar role within a complex environment.
• Broad understanding of security engineering domains, including application security, cloud security, and infrastructure security.
• Proven experience leading, coaching, or mentoring engineering or security teams.
• Hands-on experience implementing and operating security tooling across DevSecOps environments.
• Experience embedding security into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., using AWS, Azure, or GitHub-based workflows).
• Strong knowledge of secure development practices, threat modelling, and vulnerability management.
• Solid understanding of modern software engineering practices and cloud-native architectures.

Why Join?

• Be part of a long-term, high-profile transformation programme.
• Gain broad technical exposure across modern platforms, tooling, and engineering practices.
• Clear opportunities for progression within a growing and evolving security function.
• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.

If this opportunity sounds like a good fit, apply now. We actively encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented groups and are committed to supporting accessibility needs. For more information, please apply directly or contact Abigail Moss.