Deputy CISO: Tech Security Architect & Leader

Ethos; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 327,000; Full time

Job summary

Ethos, a leading life insurance technology company, seeks a Deputy CISO to partner with the CISO in shaping security strategy, architecture, and operations across the organization. This role blends strategic leadership with hands-on security credibility to protect complex systems.

You will mentor engineers, oversee incident response, and drive secure-by-design in SDLC, cloud, APIs, and data protection, reporting directly to the CISO and engaging executives and the board as needed.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of security engineering, architecture, or leadership roles with hands-on work.
• Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity, CS, IT or related field.
• Deep hands-on expertise in cloud security architecture (AWS) including infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong background in application security, secure software development, and modern architecture patterns.
• Proven ability to read and evaluate system architecture and code at a technical level.
• Experience leading technical incident response including root cause analysis for complex, multi-system incidents.
• Demonstrated experience building and leading technical security teams.
• Strong communication skills, translating technical risk for executives and the board.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute security strategy, roadmap, and priorities with the CISO.
• Act as deputy and escalation point for security leadership and board communications.
• Mentor and lead security engineers and architects, raising technical standards.
• Own security budgeting, vendor evaluation, and resourcing decisions.
• Provide hands-on review of security architecture across cloud, apps, APIs, and infra.
• Lead threat modeling and architecture reviews for major systems and initiatives.
• Drive secure-by-design practices across SDLC and CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead or oversee major security incident responses and root cause analysis.
• Stay current on threat landscape and translate into concrete controls.

Skills

Security leadership

Cloud security (AWS)

IaC

Application security

Security architecture

Incident response

Team leadership

Technical communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field

Tools

AWS

Terraform

CloudFormation

OWASP LLM Top 10

MITRE ATLAS

NIST AI RMF

Job description

Ethos, a leading life insurance technology company, seeks a Deputy CISO to partner with the CISO in shaping security strategy, architecture, and operations across the organization. This role blends strategic leadership with hands-on security credibility to protect complex systems.

You will mentor engineers, oversee incident response, and drive secure-by-design in SDLC, cloud, APIs, and data protection, reporting directly to the CISO and engaging executives and the board as needed.