Lead Security Engineer

About the Role

Role Facts

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

Security Strategy and Governance

• Define and drive the security roadmap, risk register, and security policies aligned with business and product priorities.
• Establish an engineering-friendly security culture that enables product delivery.

Application and Cloud Security

• Secure the SDLC through threat modeling, secure code review, dependency scanning, SAST, and DAST.
• Harden GCP, AWS, or Azure environments with network segmentation, workload identity, security groups, WAF, and infrastructure-as-code guardrails.
• Own DDoS protection, container and Kubernetes security, image scanning, runtime protection, and actionable SIEM/SOAR detections.

Identity, Endpoint, and Vulnerability Security

• Design and enforce IAM, SSO, MFA, least privilege, role-based access, and periodic access reviews.
• Implement secrets and key management, endpoint protection, device management, and disk encryption.
• Own vulnerability management and conduct or manage vulnerability assessments, penetration tests, and red-team engagements.

Response, Resilience, Data, and AI

• Build incident response plans covering detection, triage, containment, forensics, and post-incident reviews.
• Establish backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity practices for critical systems.
• Secure data and AI workloads and assess risks including model and prompt injection, training-data leakage, and third-party AI exposure.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 7–10+ years in security engineering, including at least 2–3 years in a lead or ownership role.
• 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 with DDoS mitigation, WAF, SIEM, EDR, and secrets management tooling.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash automation and ability to communicate risk to engineers and executives.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications such as OSCP, CISSP, CCSP, CISM, or cloud security specialty certifications are preferred.

Role Opportunity

• The role offers greenfield ownership, broad impact across AI and data products, and a growth path toward Head of Security or CISO.
• Competitive compensation and relocation support to the UAE are mentioned.