Lead Security Engineer

Made Tech helps UK government and public sector organisations build better digital services - and security is central to that mission. As a Lead Security Engineer in our Cyber practice, you'll be the most senior security engineering voice on client engagements, setting technical direction for how organisations design, build, and defend secure systems. You'll work across complex government programmes where the stakes are real: services that affect citizens, systems that hold sensitive data, and teams that need to move quickly without cutting corners.
This isn't a role where you sit at the edge of delivery reviewing outputs. You'll be embedded in multidisciplinary teams, shaping how security is engineered into everyday work - from threat modelling and architecture at design time to hardened, monitored systems in production. You'll build trusted relationships with client engineering leads, platform teams, and senior stakeholders, translating between deep technical decisions and the trade-offs senior leaders need to understand. You'll bring the judgement to know when a heavyweight security architecture is warranted and when a lighter-weight, faster-moving approach serves the engagement better.

At Lead level, your impact extends beyond the immediate team. You'll establish security engineering standards and reference architectures across engagements, grow the technical capability of the people around you — colleagues and client engineers alike — and contribute to how Made Tech's Cyber practice develops as a community. If you'd rather build the paved road than police the off-road, who treat security as an engineering discipline rather than a compliance exercise, and who cares about leaving client teams genuinely stronger than you found them, this role is for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical security architecture across engagements. Design secure-by-default reference architectures, set patterns for identity, network, and data protection, and maintain living technical standards — feeding directly into how teams build, not just how they're audited.
• Lead vulnerability remediation as an engineering programme. Define the prioritisation framework — drawing on EPSS, KEV, CVSS, and asset criticality — set remediation SLAs, own the risk-acceptance register, and drive fixes directly into delivery backlogs alongside product teams. Report programme KPIs (MTTR by severity, backlog age, coverage, recurrence rate) to senior stakeholders.
• Drive security into the team's normal engineering rhythm. Embed threat modelling, secure code review, SAST, SCA, dependency policy, and container scanning into design and delivery cycles — building the tooling and automation that make this the default, not a specialist handover at the end of a sprint.
• Navigate UK government security standards with confidence — as an engineer, not a paperwork exercise. Design systems and controls that satisfy the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework, GovAssure, Cyber Essentials, and HMG Security Policy Framework, applying them proportionately across engagements as guardrails that enable safe delivery, not barriers to it. Engage with government security communities and coordinate with departmental technical teams.
• Communicate security risk in terms that drive engineering decisions. Report system posture, remediation programme performance, and architectural risk to senior client stakeholders — tailoring the frame for the audience and structuring reports around the decisions the reader needs to make, not just the findings.
• Set the standard for incident response and detection engineering. Build and drive adoption of detection, alerting, and IR tooling across engagements, own the IR-to-vulnerability-management feedback loop, and coordinate cross-team exercises including known-exploited-vulnerability scramble drills.
• Grow the people around you. Mentor colleagues across the practice and at client organisations, pair on complex or unfamiliar engineering problems, and create structured development opportunities — including for client engineers who may not yet have strong security habits.
  
  
• Contribute to Made Tech's Cyber practice beyond delivery. Shape practice standards, contribute to hiring and technical calibration, build and share expertise externally, and help grow a security engineering community that raises capability across the organisation.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Essential

• Deep hands-on experience designing and building secure cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP) at scale, including IAM, network segmentation, and data protection patterns.
• Proven track record embedding security tooling and automation into CI/CD pipelines and engineering workflows across multiple teams.
• Strong proficiency in at least one programming/scripting language, used to build production-grade security tooling (not just scripts).

DesirableThe following would strengthen your application. We don't expect every candidate to bring all of these.
Certifications

• OSCP, OSWE, or equivalent offensive security credential
• AWS/Azure/GCP security specialty certification
• CKS (Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist)

Capabilities and experience

• Experience establishing and operating vulnerability remediation programmes at organisational scale — including risk-based prioritisation using EPSS, KEV, and asset criticality, and driving fixes across multiple delivery teams.
• Evidence of designing systems that satisfy UK government security frameworks — GovAssure, CAF, Cyber Essentials, HMG Security Policy Framework — in a complex multi-supplier or multi-team environment, as an architect rather than an assessor.
• Experience conducting or coordinating technical security reviews and penetration testing in UK public sector contexts, including remediating findings and briefing senior technical stakeholders.
• Working knowledge of exposure management beyond CVE-only approaches — incorporating misconfiguration, identity exposure, and attack-path analysis using cloud-native tooling (AWS Inspector, GuardDuty, Security Hub, or equivalents).
• Experience securing software supply chains — SBOM generation, dependency provenance, artifact signing — and integrating this into build pipelines rather than a standalone assurance process.
• Experience building or shaping security engineering capability within a consultancy, programme delivery, or multi-client environment — including growing technical skills in colleagues and client teams.
• Evidence of acting as a trusted technical adviser to senior client stakeholders — anchoring recommendations on engineering outcomes, challenging briefs constructively, and making security value visible through what gets shipped.
• Experience setting team ways of working in iterative delivery environments — establishing retrospective cadences, collaborative problem-solving norms, and pairing practices that spread security knowledge across the team.

Tooling and practice familiarity

• Deep familiarity with structured threat modelling approaches — STRIDE, MITRE ATT&CK, attack trees — and experience embedding these into agile delivery ceremonies.
• Experience integrating SAST, SCA, dependency scanning, and container security tooling into CI/CD pipelines as part of a shift-left security approach, including building custom tooling where off-the-shelf doesn't fit.
  
  

Made Tech sponsors attainment of recognised cyber certifications for staff in scope. If you don't yet hold the listed credentials but are actively working toward them, or can