Cloud Security Engineer

As a Cloud Security Engineer at Starling, you'll be building and supporting tooling and infrastructure that spans across AWS and GCP supporting our internal operations and interfacing with other teams to deliver the services that support our business.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. In Technology, we're asking that you attend the office a minimum of 1 day per week.

Our Engineering Environment

Starling engineers are excited about helping us deliver new features, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be.

Requirements

We are seeking an experienced Cloud Security Engineer who believes that great security is built, not just configured. At Starling, security is a fundamental engineering pillar, and we're looking for a practitioner who thinks like a developer. While we are looking for deep cloud expertise, we are also highly interested in candidates with strong programming skills and a background in software engineering who want to apply those talents to security. This is a hands‑on role for a builder who excels at writing clean, scalable code to automate away manual gates. You will work across AWS and GCP, developing the internal tools, guardrails, and services that empower our engineering teams to ship securely without sacrificing speed.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineer Secure Foundations: lead the design and implementation of critical security services, with a heavy focus on building robust Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems and automated, API‑driven certificate management workflows.
• Security‑as‑Code & Scalability: leverage a software‑first philosophy, develop and maintain high‑quality, scalable security tooling and middleware within ECS and Kubernetes environments, ensuring security logic is integrated directly into the deployment pipeline.
• Collaborative Code Ownership: serve as a technical authority in cross‑functional code reviews, acting as an engineering peer who helps teams bake security into their services from the first line of code to the final pull request.
• Proactive System Hardening: stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape by treating security as a continuous engineering challenge—proactively identifying vulnerabilities and architecting technical solutions to fortify our global ecosystem.

Professional Requirements

• Demonstrated ability to architect secure, distributed systems with a focus on programmatic IAM and automated, API‑driven PKI management.
• Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in Terraform and a deep commitment to writing clean, maintainable, and production‑grade code—ideally in Golang.
• A test‑first mentality toward security, with experience building unit and integration tests into CI/CD pipelines to ensure that security guardrails are as reliable as the features they protect.
• A strong conceptual grasp of cryptographic primitives and hands‑on experience securing containerized workloads and service meshes within ECS and Kubernetes.
• A track record of taking end‑to‑end ownership of complex technical projects, from initial design docs and RFCs through to deployment and observability.
• A belief that if it isn't tested, it's broken, and a drive to proactively identify and fix vulnerabilities by treating security as a continuous engineering challenge.

Our Team Philosophy

The Security Engineering team is a diverse and dynamic group passionate about building secure and resilient systems. We're enthusiastic about security, but we're not about rigid, one‑size‑fits‑all controls. We believe in striking a balance between protecting our systems and empowering our developers to build and innovate. Our goal is to make security a seamless part of the development lifecycle, not a roadblock. If you are someone who thrives in a collaborative environment and is excited about finding innovative security solutions, we would love to hear from you.

Benefits

• 25 days holiday (plus take your public holiday allowance whenever works best for you)
• An extra day's holiday for your birthday
• Annual leave is increased with length of service, and you can choose to buy or sell up to five extra days off
• 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
• Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
• Life insurance at 4x your salary & group income protection
• Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care.
• Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
• Generous family‑friendly policies
• Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
• Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Starling is an equal opportunity employer, and we're proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Starling are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.