Security Operations Manager

Artificial Labs; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical

Income protection

Life insurance

On-site gym

Maternity/paternity pay

Stock options

Learning allowance

Company MacBook

Job summary

Artificial Labs is building its security operations capability from the ground up in London. You will design detection and monitoring, decide on in-house vs outsourced support, and establish alert handling and escalation.

You’ll lead incident responses in close collaboration with SRE and reliability teams, shaping a lean, practical security function that grows with the business. This hands-on leadership role emphasizes setting up the capability, creating playbooks, and running drills to

Qualifications

• Experience building or leading security operations, ideally setting up from scratch.
• Strong grounding in detection, monitoring, logging and alerting.
• Experience leading incident response with playbooks and exercises.
• Collaborative approach with site reliability or platform engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Set up detection and monitoring for security across the platform and wider IT, including tooling, dashboards and log sources.
• Decide how much to run in-house vs outsourcing monitoring or response, and own that relationship.
• Set up how security alerts are handled, owned and escalated, starting with working-hours coverage.
• Lead security incident response with playbooks, exercises and a central record.
• Work with the reliability team on resilience, backups, restore testing and DR exercises.
• Triage vulnerabilities into a shared tracker.
• Run exercises to test and improve defences over time.

Skills

Security operations

Detection & monitoring

Incident response

Collaboration with SRE/engineering

Outsourcing management

AI in security

Job description

About the role

We're looking for someone to build our security operations capability from the ground up. This covers how we spot when something is wrong, how we respond when it is, and how we keep improving both. It's a hands-on leadership role for the early stages, so you'll be setting things up and running them, not managing a large team from day one.

You'll design how we do detection and monitoring for security, decide the right mix of in-house work and outsourced support, and set up how alerts are handled and escalated. You'll also lead how we respond to incidents, working closely with our engineering and reliability colleagues, since a lot of this sits alongside how they already keep our services running.

This is a deeply collaborative role. In particular you'll work hand in hand with our site reliability engineering (SRE) team, since much of security monitoring and response builds on the same tooling and ways of working they already use to keep our services running. We want to avoid heavy, siloed processes and instead build a lean, practical capability that fits how the rest of the business works, bringing in specialist help where it makes sense.

Job responsibilities

• Set up detection and monitoring for security across the platform and wider IT, including the tooling, dashboards and log sources needed to investigate quickly
• Decide how much we run ourselves and where we use outsourced monitoring or response, and own that relationship
• Set up how security alerts are handled, owned and escalated, starting with working-hours coverage
• Lead how we respond to security incidents, including playbooks for the most likely scenarios, a single place of record, and regular practice exercises
• Work with the reliability team on resilience and recovery, including backups, restore testing and disaster-recovery exercises
• Triage vulnerabilities found in our running systems and infrastructure into a shared tracker
• Run exercises that test and improve our defences over time

About you

Skills, experience and qualifications

• Experience building or leading security operations, or detection and response, ideally somewhere you had to set it up rather than inherit it
• Strong grounding in detection and monitoring, including logging, alerting and building useful detections
• Experience leading incident response, including playbooks, exercises and learning from what happened
• A strongly collaborative approach, with real experience working alongside site reliability or platform engineering teams and sharing tooling where it makes sense
• Experience choosing and managing outsourced monitoring or response providers
• A practical, low-drama approach that keeps things proportionate
• Willing to explore where AI can help in security monitoring and response, and pragmatic about applying it where it genuinely fits the use case

We especially want to hear from you if you have:

• Built a security operations capability in a scale-up
• Worked in InsurTech, FinTech or another regulated industry
• Experience with detection and response in cloud-based environments
• Run tabletop or disaster-recovery exercises
• Experience with offensive and defensive testing to sharpen defences

Benefits

• Private medical insurance
• Income protection insurance
• Life insurance of 4 * base salary
• On-site gym and shower facilities
• Enhanced maternity and paternity pay
• Team social events and company parties
• Salary exchange on pension and nursery fees
• Access to Maji, the financial wellbeing platform
• Company stock options managed through Ledgy
• Milestone Birthday Bonus and a Life Events leave policy
• Generous holiday allowance of 28 days plus national holidays
• Home office and equipment allowance, and a company MacBook
• Learning allowance and leave to attend conferences or take exams
• YuLife employee benefits, including EAP and bereavement helplines
• For each new hire, we plant a tree through our partnership with Ecologi Action
• The best coffee machine in London, handmade in Italy and imported just for us!

We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to building a team that reflects the diverse communities around us. If there’s anything you need to make the hiring process more accessible, just let us know—we’re happy to make adjustments. You’re also welcome to share your preferred pronouns with us at any point.

Think you don’t meet every requirement? Please apply anyway. We value potential as much as experience, and we know that raw talent counts.

As part of our hiring process, we’ll carry out some background checks. These may include a criminal record check, reviewing your credit history, speaking with previous employers and confirming your academic qualifications.