Day rate: £600 - £700 Inside IR35 via Umbrella
Location: Reading (Once a week on site, Wednesday's)
Contract: 6 months initial
Our client, a leading financial services organisation is looking for a hands‑on Secure by Design Lead to take charge of its security consultancy function. This is a chance to shape how security is built into business and technology change, including the secure adoption of AI.
You'll lead a team of security consultants and architects, raising the quality and consistency of their work while keeping close to the technical detail yourself. The team is capable but works in pockets, so a big part of the role is bringing people together around shared standards and one way of working.
What you'll be doing:- Leading, coaching and developing the team, with clear direction, regular peer reviews and honest, constructive challenge
- Aligning the team's work to group standards and frameworks and building on recent improvements to ways of working
- Providing technical leadership on design reviews, threat modelling and security assurance across applications, cloud, identity, data and third‑party services
- Acting as the senior escalation point for complex security challenges
- Building strong relationships with business and technology leaders and turning technical risk into clear advice that supports good decisions
- Building AI security assurance into the service, covering internal AI use cases, agentic AI and third‑party AI suppliers
- Defining the service model and roadmap, including risk‑based tiering of engagements, a single engagement route and a clear service catalogue
- Deep knowledge of Secure by Design principles, with a solid background in security engineering and architecture
- Proven experience leading a security consultancy or architecture team and raising its standards and consistency
- A confident, approachable people leader who can challenge constructively, upskill others and bring a team together
- Strong technical grounding across cloud, infrastructure, applications and identity and the credibility to challenge solution designs
- Practical experience of AI security risk and assurance, including LLM and agentic AI threat modelling, with knowledge of NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and OWASP guidance for LLM applications
- Experience supporting complex transformation programmes
- Energy and drive, with a real appetite for improving how a team works
- Experience in a large or highly regulated organisation
- Knowledge of ISO 27001, NIST and OWASP
- CISSP, CISM or equivalent
Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients.
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