Lead Security Operations Engineer

Salary: £70,000 - 105,000 per year

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in security operations, incident response, or a closely related discipline.
• Proven track record of materialised risk reduction through monetary impact, incidents contained, and forensics that changed outcomes.
• Strong development and engineering background, with comfort writing automation rather than only specifying it.
• Hands-on SOC and SIEM management experience, including detection engineering and log pipeline design.
• Experience in scale-up environments, where capability was built rather than inherited.
• Strong understanding of cloud architectures, including AWS and part of the estate on GCP, and how infrastructure decisions shape detection and response.
• Demonstrated experience using AI and/or coding automation to get security controls built, implemented, and operating in practice.
• Fintech, payments, fraud, or trust & safety experience is an advantage, as is exposure to highly regulated environments.
• Backgrounds that tend to do well here include incident response, IR management, SOC engineering, security engineering, DevSecOps, red team, or blue team.
• Must be physically based in the country of choice with a valid right to work.
• Must be available to participate in an on-call rotation.

Responsibilities

• Build and own a structured SecOps roadmap grounded in frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK, NIST, and CIS benchmarks.
• Lead security investigations and digital forensics, from suspicious traffic through to full incident response, and feed findings back into detection and prevention.
• Design, tune, and scale the SIEM and logging pipeline through standardized log ingestion across services.
• Strengthen perimeter and authentication posture, including WAF configuration, authorisation tuning, and monitoring for suspicious traffic.
• Protect sensitive data through DLP controls and ensure coverage matches where the data actually lives.
• Improve the on-call rotation, including alerting, escalation paths, and response SLAs.
• Automate detection and response workflows using code and AI to reduce manual toil and shorten time to resolution.
• Reduce SecOps-attributed risk identified through compliance gaps and collect evidence that demonstrates it.
• Build dashboards and reporting that give the team and leadership visibility into response times, coverage, and risk reduction.
• Work cross-functionally with engineers who do not have a security background, translating threat models into changes they can actually ship.
• Get deep into Pleos security landscape, detection coverage, logging estate, and cloud footprint to assess the biggest risks.
• Publish a SecOps roadmap, align it with Engineering, Risk & Compliance, and leadership, and start delivering against it.
• Stand up the on-call rotation and the associated alert response SLAs.
• Ship the first wave of detection and automation improvements and establish KPIs to show what changed.

Technologies

• AI
• AWS
• Cloud
• DevSecOps
• GCP
• Support
• Security
• WAF
• LESS

More

We at Pleo are changing spend management by building solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and effective for finance teams and employees. We are a driven, progressive, and kind team of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, supporting 40,000+ customers. This Lead Security Operations Engineer role sits within our Cybersecurity team and reports to our VP of Fraud & Security, working closely with Fraud, DevSecOps, Engineering, and Risk & Compliance. We offer remote, hybrid, or in-person working in London, Copenhagen, Lisbon, or Madrid, provided you are physically based in the country of choice with a valid right to work, and we cannot offer visa sponsorship. Benefits include your own Pleo card, lunch on work days, comprehensive private healthcare depending on location, 25-28 days of holiday plus public holidays, hybrid and fully remote options, the option to buy 5 extra days of holiday, free mental health and well-being support through MyndUp, and paid parental leave. The role offers a large blast radius at a pre-IPO company, the chance to build a function rather than just maintain one, and room for growth into people leadership.

last updated 34 week of 2026