Security Engineering Lead — Cloud-Native Trading Platform

Smarkets; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock Options

Pension Scheme

Health Insurance

25 days of annual leave

Hybrid working model (3 days in office

Learning & Development £1,000 annual

Job summary

Smarkets is seeking an inaugural security engineering hire to stand up and mature the security program across our core products and trading infrastructure. You will lead regulatory engagement, define risk-based strategy, and guide incident response as we scale.

You will work from within Infrastructure and Engineering, collaborating with leadership to ensure security posture meets CFTC and industry standards, while enabling rapid, secure deployment across cloud environments.

Qualifications

• Security expert with hands-on experience building security engineering/DevSecOps capabilities in a cloud-native, high-growth environment — ideally financial services or exchange infrastructure
• Excellent communication skills for executive, board, and regulatory audiences
• Familiarity with CFTC system safeguards expectations, including 17 C.F.R. § 38.1051 and § 39.18 or similar regulatory requirements
• Strong grasp of application security principles (OWASP Top 10, NIST) and secure SDLC practices
• Proficiency with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CircleCI) and security tools (Snyk, Aqua, Trivy, Checkov, Twistlock, Clair)
• Hands-on expertise securing AWS/Azure/GCP, Kubernetes, containers, and IaC
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, Go, or similar

Responsibilities

• First dedicated security engineering hire, working from within Infrastructure and Engineering teams to establish and evolve Smarkets' security capabilities
• Own regulatory/industry engagement (including CFTC), reflecting external expectations in internal practice
• Define a pragmatic, risk-based security strategy across cloud infrastructure, applications, trading systems, and corporate environment
• Lead or support the investigation, containment and remediation of security incidents, including post-incident root cause analysis and corrective actions
• Work with Engineering teams to build security into the SDLC — SAST, DAST, SCA, container/IaC scanning in CI/CD — without becoming a delivery bottleneck
• Implement controls across AWS, Kubernetes, containers, and IaC, hardening identity, secrets, and network access
• Establish security monitoring and detection across applications, APIs, and infrastructure
• Develop and maintain security policies, standards, and controls meeting DCM/DCO requirements
• Maintain evidence and documentation to support regulatory examinations and audits
• Act as a security partner to engineers, building a culture of ownership over security

Skills

Security engineering

DevSecOps

Executive communication

Regulatory awareness

Cloud-native

CI/CD tooling

Python/Bash/Go

Tools

Snyk

Aqua

Trivy

Checkov

Twistlock

Clair

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Azure DevOps

CircleCI

Kubernetes

Containers

IaC

Job description

Smarkets is seeking an inaugural security engineering hire to stand up and mature the security program across our core products and trading infrastructure. You will lead regulatory engagement, define risk-based strategy, and guide incident response as we scale.

You will work from within Infrastructure and Engineering, collaborating with leadership to ensure security posture meets CFTC and industry standards, while enabling rapid, secure deployment across cloud environments.