Lead Cyber Research Engineer Ref. 3789 in London

Salary: £53,267 to £62,599, depending on skills and experience. This role offers a specialist capability-based pay approach, designed to recognise and reward your cyber technical expertise. Following an assessment of your skills and experience at interview, you may be eligible for an additional skills payment, which could increase your salary to up to £62,599. To maintain a higher salary within this range, you’ll be supported to demonstrate and accredit your skills against our Cyber Technical Framework within your first year. If you’re not able to evidence all the required skills straight away, we’ll provide support and time to help you close any gaps. If the required level isn’t reached by the end of the first year, your salary may move to the lower end of the range. However, as your skills grow and are maintained, you’ll have ongoing opportunities to progress within the pay range at this grade. You can apply to have your developing skills levels recognised at regular intervals, in agreement with your line manager.

Flexible working: we support a range of flexible working arrangements including compressed hours, flexible start and finish times and part-time working where possible. Due to the sensitive nature of the role, this position is office-based and home or remote working is not possible.

About us: MI5 keeps the country safe from serious threats like terrorism and attempts by states to harm the UK, its people and way of life. We carry out investigations by obtaining, analysing, and assessing intelligence, and then work with a range of partners including MI6 and GCHQ to disrupt these threats. Through our protective security arm, we provide advice and guidance to government, businesses and other organisations about how to keep themselves safe. A role in MI5 means you’ll do unique and challenging work in a supportive and encouraging environment, making a real difference to UK national security.

The role: As a Lead Cyber Research Engineer, you’ll play a central role in identifying vulnerabilities, understanding how systems can be exploited and developing practical ways to defend them. Combining hands-on engineering with deep security expertise, you’ll help shape how cyber threats are understood, tested and mitigated across a complex and evolving technology landscape. Working in a highly collaborative environment, you’ll tackle challenging security problems through a mix of research, experimentation and engineering. This could involve analysing attack techniques, reverse engineering software, testing systems under real-world conditions or building bespoke tools to uncover and demonstrate vulnerabilities. The work is varied and often fast-moving, requiring both technical depth and creative problem-solving. You’ll contribute to the development of new security capabilities, working closely with engineers, researchers and stakeholders to ensure solutions are effective, scalable and usable. Writing code, building tooling and creating repeatable processes will form a core part of the role, helping to improve both efficiency and impact. As a lead, you’ll provide technical direction within your team – guiding approaches, shaping solutions and supporting others to deliver high-quality work. Mentoring and knowledge sharing are central, helping to develop capability and promote strong engineering and security practices, without the requirement for formal line management. Operating across teams, you’ll influence how security is approached more broadly – working with others to strengthen resilience, improve understanding of risk and ensure systems are robust against evolving threats.

About you: You’ll bring strong technical experience across cyber security and software or systems engineering, with the ability to understand how technologies work at a deep level and how they can be exploited. This might come from areas such as security research, reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery, systems programming or working with operating systems and networks. You’ll be confident writing code across a range of languages (for example Python, Java or C/C++), and using this to test, prototype or build tools. You have a solid understanding of how systems communicate and operate, alongside practical experience of investigating real-world problems, identifying vulnerabilities and developing effective solutions. You think analytically and approach problems with curiosity, using experimentation and research to explore how systems behave under different conditions. Just as importantly, you can communicate your findings clearly – whether through written outputs, presentations or working directly with others to explain risks and recommendations. You enjoy working collaboratively, sharing knowledge and supporting others to develop. While no formal leadership experience is required, you’ll be comfortable guiding others, contributing to technical direction and helping raise standards across a team.

Training and development: You’ll benefit from a well-established and flexible development programme designed to support both your technical depth and leadership capability. From the outset, you’ll receive a structured induction within your team, alongside wider familiarisation with the broader organisation and its technical landscape. Ongoing development is a core part of the role. You’ll have access to a wide range of learning opportunities, from self-directed research and development days through to formal external training and industry-recognised certifications, aligned to your areas of interest and business need. This could include areas such as cloud technologies, networking, systems engineering or specialist security disciplines like reverse engineering and forensics. You’ll also be supported to attend and contribute to internal and external conferences, sharing knowledge and staying connected to developments in the wider cyber security community. Learning is embedded in the day-to-day – through hands-on problem solving, collaboration and mentoring others. You’ll continue to grow your own expertise while also helping develop those around you, strengthening capability across the team over time.

Rewards and benefits: You’ll receive a starting salary of £53,267 to £62,599 plus other benefits including: 25 Days Annual Leave automatically rising to 30 days after 5 years' service, and an additional 10.5 days public and privilege holidays, opportunities to be recognised through our employee performance scheme, dedicated development budget, interest-free season ticket loan, excellent pension scheme, cycle to work scheme, facilities such as a gym, restaurant, and on-site coffee bars (at some locations), paid parental and adoption leave.

Equal opportunities: At MI5 diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: those with different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking and those with disabilities or neurodivergent conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including those from groups that are under-represented in our workforce such as women, those from an ethnic minority background, people with disabilities and those from low socio-economic backgrounds.

We’re Disability Confident: MI5 is proud to have achieved Leader status within the Department for Work and Pensions Disability Confident scheme. This is aimed at encouraging employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain, and develop disabled people. Being Disability Confident, we aim to offer a fair and proportionate number of person-to-person interviews to any candidate who self-identifies as disabled and meets the essential criteria for the role.

What to expect: Our recruitment process is fair, transparent, and based on merit. Here is a brief overview of each stage, in order: An initial online application form including pre-screening questions to ensure you meet our eligibility criteria. Online Situational Judgement Test (SJT) in which you rate the appropriateness of responses to a series of short scenarios. Application sift, looking at your motivation for the role and the organisation. If successful, you’ll be invited to an initial online interview where you’ll be asked questions relating to your motivation and our core competencies. If successful, you’ll be invited to a face-to-face technical skills-based interview, in areas relevant to the role. If successful, you’ll receive a conditional offer of employment, subject to vetting.

Please note, you must successfully pass each stage of the process to progress to the next. Your application may take around 6 to 9 months to process including vetting, so we advise you continue any current employment until you have received your final job offer.

Before you apply: To work at MI5, you need to be a British citizen or hold dual British nationality. Read about our eligibility criteria. This role requires the highest security clearance, known as Developed Vetting (DV). It’s something everyone in the UK Intelligence Community undertakes. Find out more about the vetting process. Please note we have a strict drugs policy, so once you start your application, you can’t take any recreational drugs and you’ll need to declare your previous drug usage at the relevant stage. Before you apply, we advise you to consider setting up a separate email address for your contact with us, to ensure your personal and application correspondence remain separate. Try to avoid having identifying features in your email address, such as your first and/or surname and date of birth. This is good practice and will help you manage your application with us more discretely. The role is based in Central London so you’ll need to live within a commutable distance. Please consider any financial implications and practicalities before submitting an application, as we do not offer relocation costs. We offer reasonable reimbursement of travel costs for candidates attending in person appointments during the recruitment and vetting process. Full details will be provided with your interview or assessment invitation. Reimbursement is discretionary and will only be made in line with the Candidate Expenses Policy, as amended from time to time. Candidates must book their own travel, using the most economical option, and provide original hardcopy receipts for reimbursement. Please note, you should only launch your application from within the UK. If you are based overseas, you should wait until you visit the UK to launch an application. Applying from outside the UK will impact on our ability to progress your application. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member.

Right to withdraw statement: Please be aware that we reserve the right to bring forward the closing date for this role from the original closing date once a certain number of applications have been received. Please be mindful of this and submit your application at your earliest convenience to avoid disappointment.