Leadership & Programme Management
- Own and evolve the application security strategy, testing roadmap, and service catalogue aligned to business and regulatory requirements.
- Lead, and mentor a team of AppSec engineers and penetration testers; manage workload, quality, and career development.
- Act as the primary escalation point for application security risk decisions across engineering and product leadership.
- Drive continuous improvement in AppSec tooling, methodologies, and coverage metrics.
- Represent the AppSec function in client discussions, audits, risk committees, and vendor assessments.
Web Application Penetration Testing
- Oversee and conduct advanced web application penetration testing including complex business logic, authentication/authorisation flaws, API abuse, and chained attack scenarios.
- Define and maintain testing methodology aligned to OWASP Testing Guide, PTES, and client-specific requirements.
- Review and quality-assure penetration test reports produced by the team before delivery to clients or stakeholders.
- Drive responsible disclosure and coordinated vulnerability management for critical findings.
Mobile Application Security
- Lead mobile security assessments for Android and iOS—static/dynamic analysis, reverse engineering, and runtime manipulation (Frida, objection, Drozer).
- Establish and maintain mobile security standards aligned to OWASP MASVS and MSTG across product teams.
- Guide development teams on secure mobile architecture: certificate pinning, secure storage, and inter-process communication security.
Source Code Review
- Conduct and oversee manual source code security reviews across multiple languages (Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, C#, and others).
- Define code review standards and integrate SAST tooling (Semgrep, Checkmarx, Veracode, SonarQube) into development workflows.
- Provide actionable, developer-centric findings with clear severity ratings and remediation guidance.
- Track remediation SLAs and report on code security posture trends over time.
DevSecOps Integration
- Lead integration of security tooling (SAST, DAST, SCA, container scanning, API security) into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and similar).
- Define pipeline security gates, policy-as-code standards, and developer feedback loops to shift security left.
- Oversee IaC security (Terraform, CloudFormation), secrets management, and supply-chain security controls.
- Collaborate with platform and cloud engineering on secure architecture, baseline hardening, and runtime protection.
Governance, Risk & Compliance
- Own the application security risk register; track, prioritise, and report on vulnerability posture to senior leadership.
- Ensure AppSec activities align with OWASP ASVS, NIST 800-53, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2.
- Define and track AppSec KPIs: mean time to remediation, critical findings per release, and coverage rates.
- Translate regulatory and client security requirements into testable engineering controls.
AI / GenAI Security
- Assess and mitigate risks in AI/GenAI applications: LLM-based apps, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows (OWASP LLM Top 10, prompt injection, data leakage).
Incorporate AI security testing into standard AppSec assessment methodologies.