Engineering Director, Security

📍London or Remote (UK) | 💰 Base salary £170k - £225k + Equity + Benefits 

Monzo is on a mission to build technology that connects the world. We are more than a platform; we are a global infrastructure that millions of people rely on for their daily lives, finances, and communication. This puts us in an incredibly unique position. We are the custodians of immense amounts of sensitive financial data as well as people’s money that are highly attractive to sophisticated adversaries and state-level actors.

Monzo has always adopted a Secure by Design model. We believe that security is not a function, but is instead a fundamental property of high-quality engineering. We have a world-class team of software and security engineers who ensure our platform is inherently secure and resilient, and we achieve that by making our security principles an invisible part of the developer experience.

The Role

The Engineering Director, Security will be a senior leader within our global Security organisation, partnering directly with the CISO and other senior engineering leaders. You will lead an organisation of 30–50 engineers and leaders to define and deliver a strategy that protects our global footprint.

We’re looking for a deeply technical software engineering leader who has built and led high performing infrastructure, platform, or distributed systems engineering organisations and can apply those skills to one of Monzo’s most important engineering challenges: making security an embedded, invisible property of how we build software.

You do not need to come from a traditional security background. We care more about exceptional engineering leadership, organisational design, platform thinking, and strong technical judgement than deep specialisation in security.

What you'll do

• Drive the secure-by-design mandate, leading the transition from reactive security to proactive architectural invariants. Your goal is to ensure that our core platform primitives - compute, storage, networking and identity - are built with inherent security properties that cannot be bypassed.
• Eliminate systemic risk by identifying fundamental, cross-cutting security problems and driving major software engineering improvements to solve them at the root. 
• Partner with product and software engineering teams to embed a healthy security culture into Monzo’s product development process.
• Cultivate an engineering-first culture, fostering a culture where security engineers are, first and foremost, software engineers. You’ll ensure your teams are delivering high-leverage tools and frameworks that enable the data and software engineering disciplines to move at the speed-of-thought, without compromising security.
• Manage a high-performing group of software engineering leaders and senior individual contributors, nurturing a diverse organisation that thrives on solving the world’s most complex security challenges.
• Collaborate with software engineering managers and engineering leaders to contribute to company-wide security best practices and standards.
• Form a close alliance with the CISO, CTO, and Product leaders to advise on the long-term health of the business, ensuring our security roadmap is aligned with our global mission.

Responsible for the engineering effectiveness and operational excellence of your teams, setting a high bar for performance, rigour, and inclusive leadership.

What we are looking for

We are looking for a leader who has been in the weeds of technical detail and has moved into high-scale leadership without losing their technical edge. This is not a traditional Head of Security or CISO-style role, and we are intentionally looking beyond career security specialists.

Strong candidates may come from software engineering, distributed systems, developer platforms, infrastructure engineering, or large-scale backend product engineering backgrounds. You do not need to have spent your career in security. What matters most is exceptional engineering leadership, strong technical judgement, and experience building highly reliable, secure-by-default software systems at scale.

Whilst this role doesn’t require deep specialist security expertise, we’re looking for:

• Architectural authority: You possess the technical depth to understand and challenge complex engineering decisions. You can lead a room of Principal Engineers through a deep-dive into distributed systems, or cryptographic trust boundaries.
• Proven leadership: You have a track record of leading engineering organisations of 30–50 people in a high-growth, top-tier tech environment. You know how to structure teams for maximum impact and autonomy.
• Software engineering experience: You likely spent the first half of your career as a Senior or Staff Engineer. You have a deep understanding of how systems are built.
• Outcome-obsessed: You prioritise high-leverage work over process for process’s sake. You understand that good security looks like a platform that is secure by default, not a long list of compliance tickets.
• Empathy & inclusion: You have a high degree of emotional intelligence and a relentless drive to create an inclusive, blameless team environment where everyone can do their best work.
• Decisiveness in ambiguity: You are comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy, making high-stakes decisions in fast-moving, often time-sensitive scenarios.

How we work 💻

Locations & Flexible Working

Our main tech hub is in London, but our engineers live everywhere in the UK— from Brighton to the Western Isles. 

We value meeting in person but there’s no pressure to come into the office, even if you're nearby. We believe you'll do your best work if you are where you want to be. If you live outside of London and we ask you to come into the office, Monzo will support you with the costs. ✨

Our offices are naturally social, especially Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, which happen to line up with our twice-weekly Monzo lunches & treat Thursdays 🍽️. Teams also schedule time together often for work and play – in or around the office, or online.

Set up a work schedule that delivers impact and fits your life.

At Monzo, we value connections, flexibility, and wellbeing. We keep our meetings during core hours to stay connected and believe in maintaining work/life balance. 

You’ll be empowered to manage your work in a way that suits you and your team, giving you the freedom for children drop-offs and pick-ups, walking your dog or adventurous cat, avoiding peak commuting times or gym slots, appointments, or supporting your family in an emergency. 🕒✨

Work the way that works for you with Monzo! 💼

The interview process

Our interview process involves 3 main stages:

1. Recruiter Call (30 mins) You'll meet our Engineering Leadership Recruiter to discuss your experience and learn more about Monzo. They'll be your partner and guide throughout the interview process.
2. Initial Call (1 hour) You'll meet with our VP of Engineering. They'll ask you about your previous experience, in particular people leadership, product delivery and technical leadership. They’ll ask example based questions (‘Tell me about a time when…’)
3. Loop Stage - This is one stage with 4 interviews (totalling 4 hours) split between a collaboration with one of our engineers on a technical exercise, as well as execution and leadership interviews.

At all stages we’ll create space for you to ask as many questions as you have, you’re interviewing us as well!

Our average process takes around 3-4 weeks but we will always work around your availability. You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions ahead of this please contact us on tech-hiring@monzo.com.

What’s in it for you

💰Base salary £170k - £225k + Equity + Benefits 

✈️ We can help you relocate to the UK

✅ We can sponsor visas

📍This role can be based in our London office, or we're open to distributed working within the UK (with ad hoc meetings in London).

⏰ We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

📚Learning budget of £1,000 a year for books, training courses and conferences

➕And much more, see our full list of benefits here