Principal Security Engineer (Risk Specialist) in London

OVO Energy is on a mission to solve one of humanity's biggest challenges, the climate crisis. We need diverse people from all abilities, gender identities, ethnicities, ages, sexual orientations, life experiences and backgrounds to join us.

In this individual contributor role, you will help shape and deliver the strategic vision for OVO's Digital Risk engineering programme. This includes developing automated, data-driven risk assessments, risk quantification and introducing accountability measures such as risk exceptions and capacity monitoring. You will work both within the immediate team and collaboratively across a wide range of teams throughout OVO.

As a Principal Security Engineer (Risk Specialist) at OVO, you will be a key technical leader responsible for shaping the risk and security engineering strategies. This involves deep hands-on expertise, strategic thinking, guiding architectural decisions, embedding risk practices in code and at scale, and leading the way in solving complex and emerging risk challenges. You will ensure systems are designed with digital risk embedded from development through to runtime, set the direction for critical risk engineering initiatives, champion risk quantification and engineering excellence, and align the digital risk approach with OVO's business goals.

Your key outcomes will be:

• Define Security Strategy & Roadmaps: Lead the definition, refinement, and communication of technical strategies and multi-year roadmaps for key risk engineering capabilities or domains, aligning them with business objectives, compliance requirements, and the evolving threat landscape.
• Architectural Leadership & Governance: Develop, maintain, and govern secure reference architectures, critical design patterns, and enforceable technical standards. Provide expert architectural consultation and design reviews for the most complex, critical, or cross-functional projects and platforms.
• Solve Top-Tier Risk and Resilience Problems: Challenge the traditional security and tech risk assessment and modelling approach. Tackle the most challenging, ambiguous, and impactful technical risk problems facing the organisation.
• Lead High-Impact Risk Initiatives: Build an automated and AI-enabled digital risk management system and use risk quantification to shape decision-making and guide prioritising risk responses and control design.
• Organisational Risk Assessment & Strategic Guidance: Serve as a definitive authority on complex digital risk assessments, particularly those with strategic implications.
• Champion Advanced Secure Development & Testing: Drive the continuous advancement, adoption, and measurement of mature Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) methodologies across the entire engineering organisation.
• Influence & Strategic Collaboration: Enable OVO to lean into smart risks by building a platform that promotes scalable risk identification, evaluation, impact analysis, risk quantification and risk transparency.
• Mentor Senior Technical Staff & Elevate Practice: Mentor Lead and Senior engineers across OVO in advanced security disciplines, strategic thinking, architecture, and technical leadership.
• Community of Practice: Drive the Community of Practice (CoP) for your role by actively leading, cultivating and growing the CoP as a result of your industry engagement and thought leadership.

You will be a successful Principal Security Engineer at OVO if you:

• Inspire and lead cross-functional teams, driving a culture of excellence and collaboration.
• Think critically and strategically to align security initiatives with business goals.
• Demonstrate excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Demonstrate strong influencing skills to drive security adoption and change across the organisation.
• Apply advanced problem-solving and analytical skills to address complex security challenges.
• Anticipate and adapt to changes in the internal and external business context.
• Dedicate time and thought to mentoring and developing other senior security professionals and technical leaders.
• Exhibit a drive to find novel, effective, and potentially unconventional solutions to hard security problems.
• Are recognised internally and potentially externally as an expert and forward-thinker.
• Are able to balance security ideals with practical business/engineering realities.
• Demonstrate a keen understanding of how security enables and impacts broader business objectives.

We offer a salary between £105,000 and £138,000, depending on your specific skills and experience, along with an on-target bonus of 15%. We provide a range of flexible benefits and progressive policies to support our employees.

For your health, we offer benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance, critical illness cover, life assurance, and health assessments.

For your wellbeing, we provide gym membership, travel insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, dental insurance, and more.

For your lifestyle, we offer extra holiday buying, discount dining, home & tech loans, and support for your favourite charities.

For your commute, we have deals on ultra-low emission car leasing, a cycle to work scheme, and public transport season ticket loans.

To find better ways to support our people, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO, led by our people, for our people.

If you have any additional requirements, there’s a space to let us know on the application form; we want to make the process as easy and comfortable for you as possible.

Interested in this position? Please submit your resume and cover letter through the application portal.