Principal Cyber Security Specialist

Vanquis Bank; Bradford; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading UK banking institution seeks a Principal Cyber Security Specialist to enhance security operations through automation and tool integration. The successful candidate will have over 5 years of experience in security engineering, particularly in cloud environments such as Azure and AWS. This hybrid position allows for flexible working days, supporting a positive work-life balance. Key responsibilities include mentoring junior staff and engineering cloud-native security solutions while collaborating across various teams.

Benefits

25 days holiday, rising to 30

Up to 10% pension contribution

Work abroad opportunities

Volunteering days

Access to LinkedIn Learning

Birthday leave

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Security Engineering, Security Automation, or DevSecOps.
• Experience with design and implementation of security tooling.
• Strong knowledge of Azure and AWS cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Architect security-driven automation and integrations for security operations.
• Mentor junior security team members.
• Engineer and maintain cloud-native security solutions.

Skills

Security Engineering

Security Automation

DevSecOps

Scripting

Cloud Security (Azure, AWS)

Infrastructure-as-Code

Container Security

Problem-Solving

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

SIEM (e.g., Splunk)

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Overview

Title: Principal Cyber Security Specialist

Contract Type: Permanent

Location: Bradford, Chatham, Petersfield, London

Working Pattern: Hybrid (usually a couple of days a week in the office).

We welcome part-time and flexible arrangements and will aim to match your current flexibility where possible.

What We Offer

We care about your wellbeing, not just your work. Our benefits are designed to support your life, your health and your growth:

• Holidays: 25 days (rising to 30) + buy/sell up to 5 days + swap up to 4 bank holidays.
• Pension: Up to 10% employer contribution.
• Enhanced Leave: Enhanced maternity (post-probation), 4 weeks' paternity, and paid neonatal & carers leave.
• Workations: Work abroad for up to 20 days a year in approved countries.
• Birthday Leave: Your birthday off paid.
• Volunteering: 2 paid volunteering days.
• Learning: Access to LinkedIn Learning for all colleagues.
• Financial Wellbeing: Free Snoop Premium subscription.
• Healthcare: Self-pay Den plan & optional Private Medical Insurance.

The Role

You and your Team

As a Principal Cyber Security Specialist, you will play a key role in architecting, deploying, and maintaining security-driven automation, integrations, and platform engineering efforts that support security operations, threat intelligence, and incident response working under Zero trust principles.

Reporting into the Cyber Security Manager, you will work closely with the security engineering, threat intel, software engineering, Cloud engineering and security operations teams to design, build, and optimize security tooling, ensuring efficient and scalable security operations across our infrastructure.

As a Principal Cyber Security Specialist, you will:

• Support and Mentor members of the security teams, act as an escalation point for technical issues for junior staff members.
• Review and apply security design principals to high, low-level designs and patterns, in conjunction with Information Security.
• Conduct security assessments of tools and controls, identifying gaps and implementing security enhancements.
• Oversee engineering team efforts for delivery and maintenance of security tooling, ensuring alignment with overall security architecture and operational requirements.
• Engineer and maintain cloud-native security solutions in Azure, AWS and GCP (the latter an advantage but not required), ensuring security, compliance, and scalability.
• Develop and implement Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Terraform, Ansible, or similar technologies to deploy and manage security tooling.
• Design, build, and maintain security tooling and integrations that enhance security operations, threat intelligence, and detection capability.
• Collaborate with security teams to develop and optimize security workflows, automation playbooks, and integrations between security tools, SIEMs, SOAR platforms, EDR/XDR, and case management systems.
• Build and optimize, log and telemetry ingestion, aggregation, enrichment, correlation and alerting workflows across multiple data sources.
• Work with the Cloud and DevOps teams to embed security into IaC CI/CD pipelines, ensuring secure code deployment with automated quality and security gates (Container, vulnerability, secrets detection etc).
• Embed security controls, monitoring, and compliance automation across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for internally developed applications. As well as for low-code solutions (Power Platform, Salesforce, Mulesoft etc) (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning etc).
• Build and maintain Application security controls for example SaaS SPM, WAF and MAM.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in Security Engineering, Security Automation, or DevSecOps role.
• Strong hands-on experience with design and implementation of security tooling and controls.
• Strong experience of security architecture design reviews.
• Expertise in scripting and automation.
• Experience deploying and maintaining SIEMs (Rapid7 IDR, Splunk, Sentinel, etc).
• Strong cloud security engineering knowledge in Azure and AWS, with GCP an advantage but not required.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Ansible, etc.
• Strong understanding of DevOps principles and experience securing CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with container security (Docker, Kubernetes) and implementing security controls for microservices architectures.
• Familiarity with threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) and their integration with security tools.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.

Who we are

At Vanquis, our purpose is simple: to deliver caring banking that helps people make the most of life's opportunities. Founded in 1880, we\'re now a FTSE All Share specialist bank supporting over 1.7 million UK customers with responsible, tailored lending.

We\'re proud to be certified as a Great Place to Work and recognised by the Financial Times as one of the UK's Best Employers 2025 - ranked top 50 nationwide and seventh in Banking & Financial Services.

We\'re also proud signatories of the Armed Forces Covenant, actively supporting veterans, reservists and military families.

Guided by our values - caring for people, pulling together, finding better ways and getting the right things done - we\'re building a workplace where colleagues feel connected, valued and empowered. Alongside competitive pay, we offer meaningful benefits, salary reviews, a discretionary bonus scheme and continued recognition.

We\'re invested in your development too. With the right support and hands-on learning, you\'ll grow your skills, shape your career and realise your ambitions.

How We Hire

We use AI to help organise applications and surface early matches, but all decisions are made by humans. Please apply authentically - especially during interviews.

Equal Opportunities

Vanquis Bank is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value everyone's unique background, identity and experience, and we\'re committed to a workplace where all colleagues can thrive.

If you need any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, please contact [e-mail] and we\'ll be happy to help.