Senior Red Team Operator

3761 Barclays - BX - UK; United States; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclays in the United Kingdom is seeking a Senior Red Team Operator to plan and lead full-scope security engagements across cyber, physical, and social engineering domains. You will shape testing methodologies, drive improvements, and communicate findings to stakeholders.

You will mentor operators, develop new tooling and tradecraft, and stay ahead of evolving threats in a fully remote role with occasional travel.

Qualifications

• Hands-on penetration testing and red team experience.
• Hands-on ability matters more than acronyms; certifications are welcome but not required.

Responsibilities

• Scoping and leading full-scope Red Team engagements across cyber, physical, social engineering, and process attack surfaces.
• Leading on methodology: shaping how the team scopes, runs and reports engagements and driving continuous improvement.
• Designing and delivering phishing and social engineering campaigns end to end, with supporting infrastructure and payloads.
• Operating and tuning Command and Control frameworks (e.g. Cobalt Strike, Nighthawk, or equivalent) through initial access, post-exploitation, and lateral movement.
• Developing custom tooling, tradecraft, and EDR/defence-evasion techniques to emulate realistic threat actors.
• Turning engagements into clear, compelling attack narratives for engineers and executives.
• Contributing to detection and resilience improvements with defensive teams.
• Researching emerging TTPs and tooling and updating team methodologies.
• Setting the technical bar and mentoring the team.

Skills

Coding language

Problem solving

Critical thinking

Mentoring

Tools

Cobalt Strike

Nighthawk

Job description

Job Description Purpose of the role and Accountabilities

To identify potential vulnerabilities within the banks IT systems using penetration testing tools and techniques to ensure security of computer systems, applications, servers, and networks. Development and execution of assessments, audits, and threat models to identify vulnerabilities within the banks systems, applications and servers using penetration tools and techniques, and communicate key findings and recommendations to stakeholders. Collaboration with stakeholders and IT teams to identify emerging cyber-attack techniques, tools and technologies and to support the development of penetration testing methodologies. Development and maintenance of comprehensive documents and reports for senior stakeholders on penetration test findings, and remediation guidance. Collaboration with stakeholders to understand their security requirements and controls in business processes, application/services, to enhance overall security posture and assurance. Identification of emerging vulnerabilities, exploit codes and cyber-attacks to develop testing methodologies and assurance activities.

Vice President Expectations

To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and amplify breaches of policies/procedures.. If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements. If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others. OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the necessity of including other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions. Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management, on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment. Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda. Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does. Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business. Collaborate with other areas of work, for business-aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies. Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretive thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions. Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes. Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

Senior Red Team Operator Role

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave. We’re looking for a Senior Red Team Operator to join a skilled, close-knit team that genuinely loves this work. You’ll plan and lead full-scope Red Team operations – cyber, physical, social engineering, and everything in between – emulating real-world adversaries to test how our defences actually hold up under pressure. When you find the gaps, you’ll help close them. This is a hands-on role for someone who’s happiest with a shell, a payload, and a hard target. You’ll have real autonomy over how you approach engagements, time to research new tradecraft, and a team of talented operators who’ll look to you to set the technical standard, pressure-test their thinking, and lead from the front.

Key Responsibilities

• Scoping and leading full-scope Red Team engagements against well-defined adversarial objectives across cyber, physical, social engineering, and process attack surfaces.
• Leading on methodology: shaping how the team scopes, runs and reports engagements and driving continuous improvement in how you all operate.
• Designing and delivering phishing and social engineering campaigns end to end – standing up the supporting infrastructure (domains, redirectors, mail and landing-page servers), crafting convincing pretexts, and developing the accompanying payloads to emulate realistic threat-actor delivery.
• Operating and tuning Command and Control frameworks (e.g. Cobalt Strike, Nighthawk, or equivalent) through initial access, post-exploitation, and lateral movement.
• Developing custom tooling, tradecraft, and EDR / defence-evasion techniques to emulate realistic threat actors.
• Turning engagements into clear, compelling attack narratives – the kind that land with both the engineers who’ll fix the issues and the executives who need to understand the risk.
• Contributing to detection and resilience improvements through close collaboration with defensive teams.
• Researching emerging TTPs, threats, and tooling, and bringing new techniques into the team’s methodology.
• Setting the technical bar and mentoring across the team – coaching operators, reviewing tradecraft, and helping develop the next generation of Red Team talent.

Highly Valued Skills

• Certifications like CRTO, OSCP / OSEP, CRTP or CREST (CCSAS / CCRTS) are welcome, but your hands-on ability matters far more than acronyms.
• Proficiency in at least one coding language.
• Demonstrated ability to solve complex and challenging technical problems.
• You will be assessed on key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as job-specific technical skills.

Location and Remote Work

This role is fully remote role with occasional travel required.

Our Work Experience

Our Work Experience is the combination of everything that's unique about us: our culture, our core values, our company meetings, our commitment to sustainability, our recognition programs, but most importantly, it's our people. Our employees are self-disciplined, hard working, curious, trustworthy, humble, and truthful. They make choices according to what is best for the team, they live for opportunities to collaborate and make a difference, and they make us the #1 Top Workplace in the area.