Lead Security Engineer

About the Role

Workplace and Reporting

• The role is onsite in the UAE.
• The position reports to the CTO or VP Engineering.
• The employment type is full-time.

Security Strategy and Application Security

• Define and drive the security roadmap, risk register, and policies aligned with business and product priorities.
• Establish an engineering-friendly security culture that enables shipping.
• Secure the SDLC through threat modeling, secure code review, dependency and supply-chain scanning, and SAST or DAST in CI/CD.
• Protect repositories and developer environments with access controls, branch protection, signed commits, and secrets scanning.

Cloud and Infrastructure Security

• Harden GCP, AWS, or Azure environments with network segmentation, workload identity, security groups, WAF, and infrastructure-as-code guardrails.
• Implement DDoS protection, CDN or WAF controls, rate limiting, and traffic anomaly detection.
• Own container and Kubernetes security, image scanning, and runtime protection.
• Establish logging, monitoring, alerting, SIEM or SOAR integrations, and actionable detection rules.

Identity and Corporate Security

• Design and enforce IAM across cloud, SaaS, and internal systems, including SSO, MFA, least privilege, role-based access, and periodic reviews.
• Implement secrets and key management with rotation, encryption, and removal of hard-coded credentials.
• Deploy and manage EDR or XDR, MDM, and disk encryption across employee devices.

Vulnerability and Incident Response

• Own continuous vulnerability scanning, prioritization, remediation service levels, and the vulnerability management lifecycle.
• Plan and conduct vulnerability assessments and penetration tests and manage external pentest and red-team engagements.
• Build and own incident response covering detection, triage, containment, forensics, and post-incident reviews.
• Establish backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity practices for critical systems.

Data and AI Security

• Secure data pipelines, data stores, and ML or AI workloads through classification, encryption, access controls, and privacy by design.
• Assess and mitigate model and prompt injection, training-data leakage, and third-party AI or API exposure.

Must-Have Qualifications

• Seven to ten or more years of security engineering experience, including at least two to three years in a lead or ownership role.
• Deep hands-on experience across at least three of cloud security, application security, IAM, offensive security, or incident response.
• Strong cloud security expertise on GCP, AWS, or Azure, including Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Practical experience implementing DDoS mitigation, WAF, SIEM, EDR, and secrets management tooling.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash scripting or automation.
• Ability to communicate risk clearly to engineers and executives in a fast-moving environment with limited resources.

Preferred Qualifications

• OSCP, CISSP, CCSP, CISM, or cloud security specialty certifications are advantageous.