Principal Cyber Security Specialist

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

Job summary

A leading financial institution in Chatham is seeking a Principal Cyber Security Specialist to architect and maintain security-driven automation and integrations. The role involves collaborating with various engineering teams to optimize security operations across infrastructures. Ideal candidates will have expertise in cloud security, security tooling, and automation. An attractive benefits package and flexible working hours are offered.

Benefits

25 days holiday up to 30 days

Up to 10% pension contribution

Enhanced maternity and paternity leave

2 paid volunteer days

LinkedIn Learning

Private Medical Insurance option

Discretionary annual bonus

Qualifications

• Experience in Security Engineering, Security Automation, or DevSecOps role.
• Strong hands-on experience with design and implementation of security tooling and controls.
• Expertise in scripting and automation.

Responsibilities

• Support and Mentor members of the security teams.
• Conduct security assessments of tools and controls.
• Engineer and maintain cloud-native security solutions.

Skills

Security Engineering

Security Automation

DevSecOps

Scripting

Cloud Security

Problem-Solving

Education

Certifications (AWS Certified Security - Specialty, Azure Security Engineer, CISSP)

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

SIEMs (Rapid7 IDR, Splunk)

Job description

The Vacancy

Job Title: Principal Cyber Security Specialist

Contract Type: Permanent

Location: Chatham, London

Working Pattern: Hybrid-typically a couple of days a week in the office. Part-time or flexible arrangements are considered to support work-life balance. A fear of losing your current working flexibility shouldn't hinder you from applying for new opportunities, which is why we aim to match your existing flexible working arrangements where possible.

What We Offer

• Holidays: 25 days holiday up to 30 days (depending on service)
• Pension: We know it is important to save for the future, that is why we will contribute up to 10%
• Maternity/Paternity: We realise that family time is important, we offer enhanced maternity (after successful completion of probation) and 4 weeks paternity leave
• Volunteering: 2 paid days to 'give back' to the charity of your choice
• Development: LinkedIn Learning for all
• Finance: Snoop Premium available to all colleagues
• Medical: Opportunity to opt in for Private Medical Insurance
• Bonus: Discretionary annual bonus

The role

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.

Responsibilities

Acting as a Technical lead, with the primary responsibilities of:

• 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.

Experience

• 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.

Qualifications

• Certifications such as AWS Certified Security - Specialty, Azure Security Engineer, CCSP, SSCP, CISSP, GIAC certs.

Why Join Us

• Flexible Working Hours: We understand the importance of work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements.
• Career Development: We provide opportunities for continuous learning and professional growth, including mentorship programs and training sessions.
• Inclusive Culture: We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive. Our diversity and inclusion initiatives ensure that all voices are heard and valued.

Offers are subject to satisfactory background checks, including credit, fraud, and employment references.

Who We Are

At Vanquis, we have a simple purpose: to deliver caring banking so our customers can make the most of life's opportunities. Established in 1880, we're now a FTSE All Share company and leading specialist bank. We lend responsibly, providing tailored products and services to over 1.75 million UK customers.

We take care of our colleagues as well as our customers, working hard to create a rewarding and supportive work environment. That means competitive salaries, benefits, and a Group-wide recognition scheme. Everyone can enrol in our pension and after six months, you can join our 'Buy as You Earn' scheme.

We're about more than financial rewards. We give everyone a voice in the business and room to be their authentic self. And we know you're here to build your career, so we help every colleague with training and development opportunities. Making sure there's always something new to learn.

Vanquis Bank is an Equal Opportunity Employer

Here at Vanquis Banking Group, we embrace everyone's unique strengths and identities to be themselves at work. Regardless of how you identify yourself, your sexual orientation, martial or civil partner status, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national background, faith, disability, or age - your experiences and background help enrich our teams, and most importantly help support our customers in the best way possible. At the end of the day, it's our people that help us to fulfil the reason why we're here in the first place: to help put people on a path to a better everyday life.

If there's anything we can do in the recruitment process to help you achieve your best, get in touch. Whether it's a copy of our application form in another format or additional assistance, we're available to help. You can contact us at [e-mail].