Founding IT Security Engineer

Mats Research, Inc.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

In-office meals & dinners

Paid travel for work

Professional development

Hybrid work model

Insurance

Job summary

Mats Research, Inc. is seeking a founder-level IT Security lead to design and stand up the corporate security function across its London and Berkeley teams.

The role focuses on endpoint security, identity, and secure collaboration in a distributed research organization while aligning with frontier-model access requirements. You will own security operations, incident response, and compliance programs, growing the team and maturing the security posture as the organization scales its research

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience building an IT and security function from scratch.
• Ability to operate autonomously in an early-stage org with ambiguity.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials and lab security requirements.
• Strong ability to translate security needs into plain English for researchers and leadership.
• Comfort with SIEM and incident response workflows.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the IT security and corporate security program across two-country offices.
• Define identity lifecycle and implement Zero-Trust controls (SSO, least privilege, hardware-key MFA).
• Implement secure email and collaboration workflows and DMARC alignment.
• Lead compliance efforts (SOC 2, ISO 27001; data-protection UK GDPR, CCPA) and vendor reviews.
• Run day-to-day security operations: access reviews, backups, incident response, audits.

Skills

IT Security

IAM/Zero Trust

Incident Response

SIEM Operations

Compliance Awareness

Tools

Rippling MDM

EDR (CrowdStrike/Defender)

SIEM (Panther/Sumo/Datadog)

Workspace Admin

IAM tooling

KnowBe4 / Hoxhunt

Vanta / Drata / Secureframe

Job description

Mats Research, Inc. is seeking a founder-level IT Security lead to design and stand up the corporate security function across its London and Berkeley teams.

The role focuses on endpoint security, identity, and secure collaboration in a distributed research organization while aligning with frontier-model access requirements. You will own security operations, incident response, and compliance programs, growing the team and maturing the security posture as the organization scales its research