Principal Software Engineer - Security

Academic Key; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Radiant in the United Kingdom is seeking a Principal Software Engineer – Security to shape the security direction of the cloud platform. You will lead design and delivery of IAM, encryption, auditing, and policy enforcement, partnering with multiple teams and customers on demanding security requirements.

You will drive automation, risk-aware architecture, and scalable security controls across the control and data planes, mentoring teams and raising engineering standards throughout the

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on engineering in Go or similar languages.
• Extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep cloud and network security, IAM, or security infrastructure expertise.
• Technical leadership at staff or principal level across multiple teams.
• Familiarity with SOC 2 / ISO 27001 controls and compliant architectures.

Responsibilities

• Set technical vision and architecture for security systems across the platform.
• Design and implement core security services: IAM, RBAC, encryption, audit logging, and policy enforcement.
• Drive automation of policy enforcement, hardening, detection, and software supply chain security.
• Lead security reviews with enterprise customers and audits; mentor engineers.
• Balance security with performance and developer experience while maintaining least privilege.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Cloud security

IAM / RBAC / SSO

Security leadership

Tools

Vault

OPA Gatekeeper

SPIFFE/SPIRE

Kubernetes security tooling

Sigstore / SBOMs

Job description

Principal Software Engineer – Security

Radiant – United Kingdom – Full Time – Link validated

What You’ll Do

As a Principal Software Engineer – Security, you will help set the technical direction for Radiant's security capabilities across the cloud platform and infrastructure, leading the design and delivery of the systems that underpin them. You'll work across identity, access control, secrets, network security, platform hardening, auditability, and compliance controls. You'll partner closely with product, infrastructure, SRE, networking, security, and compliance teams, and with customers on their most demanding security requirements. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role focused on making security embedded, scalable, automated, and easy to consume across the platform, through architecture, code, and the standards other teams build on.

Key Responsibilities

Set the technical vision and architecture for security systems and platform capabilities, and lead their design and implementation. Design and build core security services across IAM, RBAC, workload identity, secrets, encryption and key management, audit logging, network controls, and policy enforcement. Translate product, customer, and regulatory requirements into robust architectures, APIs, and technical designs, working closely with the Security Product Manager. Drive automation of policy enforcement, configuration hardening, detection, remediation, and software supply chain security. Ensure strong tenant isolation and least‑privilege access across the control plane and network and data plane. Act as a senior technical voice in enterprise customer security reviews, audits, and incident response. Raise the security engineering bar across the organisation through mentoring, code review, and technical standards.

Your Profile

Strong hands‑on engineering skills in one or more systems languages such as Go or similar. Extensive experience building and operating large‑scale distributed systems, with significant depth in cloud and network security, IAM, or security infrastructure. A track record of technical leadership at staff or principal level, including setting direction across multiple teams and delivering complex, high‑stakes systems. Deep technical expertise across: Identity & access: IAM, RBAC/ABAC, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SSO, federation, mTLS, workload and service identity Security controls: applied cryptography, encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management, KMS/HSM, key rotation, policy engines Infrastructure: Kubernetes internals, containers and runtime isolation, cloud networking, compute, storage Security operations: audit logging pipelines, detection engineering, vulnerability management, incident response Automation: policy‑as‑code, infrastructure‑as‑code, CI/CD security, software supply chain (signing, SBOMs, provenance) Hands‑on experience with technologies such as Vault, OPA/Gatekeeper, SPIFFE/SPIRE, Kubernetes admission control and security tooling, Sigstore, SIEM platforms, cloud KMS, or similar. Deep understanding of multi‑tenancy, least privilege, zero‑trust architecture, threat modelling, and shared‑responsibility models. Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001, and how they translate into technical controls. Able to balance security, performance, reliability, operational complexity, and developer experience. Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear design documents and explaining complex trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical audiences.

What You Bring

Security mindset: Think like an attacker and design systems that fail safely, without making them painful to use. Engineering excellence: Write and review code that sets the standard for correctness, reliability, and maintainability. Architectural judgement: Make sound long‑term decisions on systems that are hard to change once built. Technical leadership: Influence direction across teams without relying on authority, and grow the engineers around you. Systems thinking: Understand how controls interact across the full cloud platform, from network and infrastructure up to APIs and user experience. Ownership: Drive security capabilities from design through production, operation, and continuous improvement.

Qualities we look for

Set the standard: Every single day, you spot opportunities to constructively shake things up. Inspire the change: There's no blueprint for the future. You'll embrace challenges and change. You're real and you're true to yourself: We cherish and celebrate diversity so you'll feel right at home whoever you are and whoever you're talking to, you treat everyone the same.

Why should you join us?

What sets us apart is our blend of modern technology, competitive benefits, and an open, welcoming work culture that enables our people to thrive. Here are just some of the great things you can expect from us: 25 days of annual leave A culture that emphasises results over hierarchy, process & ego: we place great emphasis on the quality, ingenuity and creativity of work. Open communication, regular feedback: we v