Engineering Director, Security

The Role

The Engineering Director, Security will be a senior leader within our global Security organisation, partnering directly with the CISO and other senior engineering leaders. You will lead an organisation of 30–50 engineers and leaders to define and deliver a strategy that protects our global footprint.

We’re looking for a deeply technical software engineering leader who has built and led high performing infrastructure, platform, or distributed systems engineering organisations and can apply those skills to one of Monzo’s most important engineering challenges: making security an embedded, invisible property of how we build software.

You do not need to come from a traditional security background. We care more about exceptional engineering leadership, organisational design, platform thinking, and strong technical judgement than deep specialisation in security.

• 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 software engineering improvements to solve them at the root.
• Partner with product and software 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 software engineering disciplines to move at the speed-of-thought, without compromising security.
• Manage a high-performing group of software engineering leaders and senior individual contributors, nurturing a diverse organisation that thrives on solving the world’s most complex security challenges.
• Collaborate with software 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.

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. This is not a traditional Head of Security or CISO-style role, and we are intentionally looking beyond career security specialists.

Strong candidates may come from software engineering, distributed systems, developer platforms, infrastructure engineering, or large-scale backend product engineering backgrounds. You do not need to have spent your career in security. What matters most is exceptional engineering leadership, strong technical judgement, and experience building highly reliable, secure-by-default software systems at scale.

Whilst this role doesn’t require deep specialist security 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…