The Vacancy
Job Title: Principal Cyber Security Specialist
Contract Type: Permanent
Location: Chatham, London
Working Pattern: Hybrid— typically a couple of days a week in the office. Part-time or flexible arrangements are considered to support work-life balance. A fear of losing your current working flexibility shouldn't hinder you from applying for new opportunities, which is why we aim to match your existing flexible working arrangements where possible.
What We Offer
* Holidays: 25 days holiday up to 30 days (depending on service), with the option to buy or sell up to 5 extra days and swap up to 4 bank holidays.
* Pension: Employer contributions up to 10%.
* Maternity / Paternity & Other Leave: Enhanced maternity leave (post‑probation) and 4 weeks paternity leave, along with paid neonatal and carers leave.
* Volunteering: 2 paid days each year to volunteer for a chosen cause.
* Development & Learning: Access to learning for all colleagues.
* Finance: Free Snoop Premium subscription.
* Health & Wellbeing: Private Medical Insurance opt‑in, denplan dental scheme, and paid birthday leave.
* Bonus: Discretionary annual bonus.
* Workations: Up to 20 days a year to work abroad in approved countries.
* Perks: Over 30,000 discounts via the perks platform, discounted gym membership, BUPA GP service, and a workplace gallery.
* Competitive base salary and rewards.
* Defined contribution pension scheme.
* Discretionary bonus scheme.
* Monthly and quarterly colleague socials.
* Flexible, hybrid, & dynamic working policies.
* Personal & career development opportunities.
* Dedicated recognition scheme.
Role
As a Principal Cyber Security Specialist, you will play a key role in architecting, deploying, and maintaining security‑driven automation, integrations, and platform engineering efforts that support security operations, threat intelligence, and incident response under Zero Trust principles.
Reporting to the Cyber Security Manager, you will collaborate closely with security engineering, threat intelligence, software engineering, cloud engineering, and security operations teams to design, build, and optimise security tooling, ensuring efficient and scalable security operations across our infrastructure.
Responsibilities
* Act as a technical lead, supporting and mentoring security team members and serving as an escalation point for junior staff.
* Apply security design principles to high‑level designs and patterns in partnership with Information Security.
* Conduct security assessments of tools and controls, identify gaps, and implement enhancements.
* Oversee engineering team delivery and maintenance of security tooling, aligning with overall architecture and operational requirements.
* Engineer and maintain cloud‑native security solutions in Azure, AWS and (advantageously) GCP.
* Develop Infrastructure‑as‑Code solutions using Terraform, Ansible, or similar to deploy and manage security tooling.
* Design, build, and maintain security tooling and integrations that enhance operations, threat intelligence, and detection capabilities.
* Collaborate with teams to optimise security workflows, automation playbooks, and integrations between SIEMs, SOAR, EDR/XDR, and case‑management systems.
* Build and optimise log, telemetry ingestion, aggregation, enrichment, correlation, and alerting workflows across multiple data sources.
* Embed security into IaC CI/CD pipelines, automating quality and security gates for containers, vulnerabilities, and secrets.
* Embed security controls, monitoring, and compliance automation across the SDLC for internally developed applications and low‑code solutions (Power Platform, Salesforce, MuleSoft, etc.) covering SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, etc.
* Implement and maintain application security controls such as SaaS SPM, WAF, and MAM.
Experience
* Security Engineering, Security Automation, or DevSecOps background.
* Hands‑on experience designing and implementing security tooling and controls.
* Experience conducting security architecture design reviews.
* Expertise in scripting and automation.
* Proven deployment and maintenance of SIEMs (Rapid7 IDR, Splunk, Sentinel, etc.).
* Strong cloud security knowledge in Azure and AWS; GCP is an advantage.
* Experience with IaC tools such as Terraform, Ansible.
* Understanding of DevOps principles and securing CI/CD pipelines.
* Container security experience (Docker, Kubernetes) and microservices security controls.
* Familiarity with threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) and tool integration.
* Strong problem‑solving skills and ability to thrive in fast‑paced, collaborative environments.
Qualifications
* Certifications such as AWS Certified Security – Specialty, Azure Security Engineer, CCSP, SSCP, CISSP, GIAC, etc.
Why Join Us
* Flexible working hours and hybrid work environment.
* Career development opportunities, mentoring, and continuous learning.
* Inclusive culture with diversity initiatives.
Offers are subject to satisfactory background checks including credit, fraud, and employment references.
Who We Are
At Vanquis, we deliver caring banking so customers can make the most of life’s opportunities. Established in 1880, we are a FTSE All‑Share company and a leading specialist bank. We lend responsibly to over 1.75 million UK customers and support our colleagues with competitive salaries, rewards, benefits, and a group‑wide recognition scheme.
Equal Opportunity Employer
Vanquis Bank is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace everyone’s unique strengths and identities to be themselves at work, supporting our customers and our teams. If you need support during the recruitment process, please contact careers@vanquis.com.
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