Lead Cyber Research Engineer

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…