Engineering Director; Security

Requirements

• We are looking for a leader who has been in the weeds of technical detail and has moved into high‑scale leadership without losing their technical edge. Whilst this role doesn’t require very specific deep security engineering expertise, we’re looking for:
• Architectural authority:
  You possess the technical depth to understand and challenge complex engineering decisions. You can lead a room of Principal Engineers through a deep‑dive into distributed systems, or cryptographic trust boundaries
• Proven leadership:
  You have a track record of leading engineering organisations of 30–50 people in a high‑growth, top‑tier tech environment. You know how to structure teams for maximum impact and autonomy
• Software engineering experience:
  You likely spent the first half of your career as a Senior or Staff Engineer. You have a deep understanding of how systems are built
• Outcome‑obsessed:
  You prioritise high‑leverage work over process for process’s sake. You understand that good security looks like a platform that is secure by default, not a long list of compliance tickets
• Empathy & inclusion:
  You have a high degree of emotional intelligence and a relentless drive to create an inclusive, blameless team environment where everyone can do their best work
• Decisiveness in ambiguity:
  You are comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy, making high‑stakes decisions in fast‑moving, often time‑sensitive scenarios

• Monzo is on a mission to build technology that connects the world. We are more than a platform; we are a global infrastructure that millions of people rely on for their daily lives, finances, and communication. This puts us in an incredibly unique position. We are the custodians of immense amounts of sensitive financial data as well as people’s money that are highly attractive to sophisticated adversaries and state‑level actors
• Monzo has always adopted a Secure by Design model. We believe that security is not a function, but is instead a fundamental property of high‑quality engineering. We have a world‑class team of software and security engineers who ensure our platform is inherently secure and resilient, and we achieve that by making our security principles an invisible part of the developer experience
• Drive the secure‑by‑design mandate, leading the transition from reactive security to proactive architectural in variants. Your goal is to ensure that our core platform primitives – compute, storage, networking and identity – are built with inherent security properties that cannot be bypassed
• Eliminate systemic risk by identifying fundamental, cross‑cutting security problems and driving major engineering improvements to solve them at the root
• Partner with product and engineering teams to embed a healthy security culture into Monzo’s product development process
• Cultivate an engineering‑first culture, fostering a culture where security engineers are, first and foremost, software engineers. You’ll ensure your teams are delivering high‑leverage tools and frameworks that enable the data and engineering disciplines to move at the speed‑of‑thought, without compromising security
• Manage a high‑performing group of engineering leaders and senior individual contributors, nurturing a diverse organisation that thrives on solving the world’s most complex security challenges
• Collaborate with engineering managers and engineering leaders to contribute to company‑wide security best practices and standards
• Form a close alliance with the CISO, CTO, and Product leaders to advise on the long‑term health of the business, ensuring our security roadmap is aligned with our global mission
• Responsible for the engineering effectiveness and operational excellence of your teams, setting a high bar for performance, rigour, and inclusive leadership