Principal Security Engineer, OVO
Risk Specialist
£105-138k
You’ll be eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%
Senior and Expert level
Bristol
Glasgow
London
More information about location
1+ day a week in office
Powering human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone
Be an early applicant
Powering human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone
1001+ employees
B2CEnergySustainability
Be an early applicant
£105-138k
You’ll be eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%
Senior and Expert level
Bristol
Glasgow
London
More information about location
1+ day a week in office
1001+ employees
B2CEnergySustainability
Company mission
We launched in 2009 to make energy better. Over 4 million members, 5 million trees planted, and Plan Zero launched in 2019. We help UK homes reduce bills and carbon with smart tech and expert support. We believe energy can be better for customers, wallets, and the planet, uniting brilliant people to help decarbonise homes and simplify energy management.
Role
Who you are
- Inspire and lead cross-functional teams, driving a culture of excellence and collaboration
- Think critically and strategically to align security initiatives with business goals
- Demonstrate excellent verbal and written communication skills, effectively conveying complex security concepts to non-technical stakeholders
- Demonstrate strong influencing skills to drive security adoption and change across the organisation
- Apply advanced problem-solving and analytical skills to address complex security challenges
- Anticipate and adapt to changes in the internal and external business context and evolving security landscapes and emerging threats
- Dedicate time and thought to mentoring and developing other senior security professionals and technical leaders
- Exhibit a drive to find novel, effective, and potentially unconventional solutions to hard security problems
- Are recognised internally and potentially externally as an expert and forward-thinker, contributing to security communities or publications
- Are able to balance security ideals with practical business/engineering realities to achieve tangible outcomes
- Demonstrate a keen understanding of how security enables and impacts broader business objectives, strategy, and risk management
What the job involves
- Reporting to: Director of Information Security
- In this individual contributor role, you’ll help shape and deliver the strategic vision for OVO’s Digital Risk engineering programme
- This includes developing automated, data-driven risk assessments, risk quantification and introducing accountability measures such as risk exceptions and capacity monitoring
- You’ll work both within the immediate team and collaboratively across a wide range of teams throughout OVO
- As a Principal Security Engineer (Risk Specialist) at OVO, you will be a key technical leader responsible for shaping the risk and security engineering strategies
- This involves deep hands-on expertise, strategic thinking, guiding architectural decisions, embedding risk practices in code and at scale, and leading the way in solving complex and emerging risk challenges
- You will ensure systems are designed with digital risk embedded from development through to runtime, set the direction for critical risk engineering initiatives, champion risk quantification and engineering excellence, and align the digital risk approach with OVO’s business goals
- You will also be recognised as a trusted person in your field within OVO and the wider risk engineering community, particularly in challenging traditional technology risk approaches and building automated, AI-enabled digital risk management systems
- Define Security Strategy & Roadmaps: Lead the definition, refinement, and communication of technical strategies and multi-year roadmaps for key risk engineering capabilities or domains (e.g., zero trust architecture, automated risk discovery and management), aligning them with business objectives, compliance requirements, and the evolving threat landscape
- Architectural Leadership & Governance: Develop, maintain, and govern secure reference architectures, critical design patterns, and enforceable technical standards. Provide expert architectural consultation and design reviews for the most complex, critical, or cross-functional projects and platforms. Steer technology choices through an expert security lens
- Solve Top-Tier Risk and Resilience Problems: Challenge the traditional security and tech risk assessment and modelling approach. Tackle the most challenging, ambiguous, and impactful technical risk problems facing the organisation, often requiring deep research, novel solution design, and cross-functional collaboration to resolve systemic issues. Prototype, evaluate, and champion innovative security and risk solutions
- Lead High-Impact Risk Initiatives: Build an automated and Al-enabled digital risk management system and use risk quantification to shape decision-making and guide us in prioritising risk responses and control design. Drive the technical vision, architecture, and strategy for complex, organisation-wide risk engineering programmes and transformations (e.g., implementing advanced data protection assessments and controls, maturing risk response capabilities, comprehensive attack surface reduction)
- Organisational Risk Assessment & Strategic Guidance: Serve as a definitive authority on complex digital risk assessments, particularly those with strategic implications. Analyse systemic risks, synthesize complex information, and provide clear, actionable recommendations and strategic security guidance to senior leadership (VP/C-level) and technology executives
- Champion Advanced Secure Development & Testing: Drive the continuous advancement, adoption, and measurement of mature Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) methodologies (DevSecOps) and sophisticated security testing strategies (e.g., threat-led penetration testing, fuzzing at scale) across the entire engineering organisation
- Influence & Strategic Collaboration: Enable OVO to lean into smart risks by building a platform that promotes scalable risk identification. evaluation, impact analysis, risk quantification and risk transparency to increase our confidence in OVO's ability to manage digital risk. Actively influence product management, platform engineering, and business unit roadmaps to proactively incorporate necessary policies and controls as code and address significant technical debt. Build strong, collaborative relationships with senior leaders across engineering, product, legal, and other business functions
- Mentor Senior Technical Staff & Elevate Practice: Mentor Lead and Senior engineers across OVO in advanced security disciplines, strategic thinking, architecture, and technical leadership. Actively contribute to internal communities of practice, develop training for senior staff, and elevate the overall security engineering practice at OVO
- Drive the Community of Practice (CoP) for your role by actively leading, cultivating and growing the CoP as a result of your industry engagement and thought leadership
- Create content, engage in knowledge exchange / cross-pollination to further your craft
- Mentor and coach individuals in the role-based competencies associated with a CoP
- Input to upskilling and learning pathways based on the CoP that will aid individuals' career progression
Our take
On average, home energy represents 26% of our carbon footprint. Ovo Energy wants to bring this to zero by providing cheaper, greener and simpler energy to customers. It's analysing meter data to deliver easy, personalised actions, turning electric vehicles into power stations with clever chargers, and building energy-efficient heaters. For households, it's offering is organised into four different energy plans, that include interest rewards on energy credit balance.
In 2020, OVO completed the acquisition of SSE Energy Services' retail arm for £500 million, meaning that the challenger brand now has around 4 million customers in the UK.
While helping Ovo members halve their carbon footprints, the company is also working towards becoming a net zero carbon business by 2035. The challenges ahead for the company include encouraging consumer behaviour change, shifting towards subscription models for home energy use.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Meet the team
Kate Cottrell, Smart Meter Engineer
Our mission
Supporting our customers on the journey to zero carbon by delivering exceptional customer service and promoting energy efficiency.Insights
Top investors
Company
Employee endorsements
Inspiring mission
"The mission to provide Green energy to all customers, and to enable all our customers to start on a journey towards zero carbon living is written in..."
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jul 2023
$268.8m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Feb 2019
$268.8m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $579.3m
Company benefits
- On-target bonus up to 15%. We have one OVO bonus plan that focuses on the collective performance of our people to deliver our Plan Zero goal
- Flex Pay: 9% on top of your salary - 4% of this is auto enrolled into your pension, and the remaining 5% is yours to do what you like with. You can use this to buy from our extensive range of flexible benefits, including our green benefits which we've put at the heart of our offering, add to your pension or even take it as cash
- 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays)
- For your health: With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more
- For your wellbeing: With gym membership, travel insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, dental insurance, and more
- For your lifestyle: With extra holiday buying, discount dining, home & tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations
- For your home: Get up to £400 towards any OVO Energy plan, plus great discounts on solar, smart thermostats and EV chargers
- For your commute: Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans
- For your belonging: To find better ways to support our people, we need to listen to each other’s experiences and find ways to build a truly inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of this, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO. Led by our people, for our people - so when you join OVO, you can play a part - big or small - with any of the Networks. It's up to you
Company HQ
Bristol, UK
Leadership
David Buttress
(CEO)CEO of OVO, the UK’s 3rd largest energy supplier. Joined in May 2024.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at OVO
Louise Bailey (Belonging Lead)
- We run inclusive training and unconscious bias workshops for employees and interviewers
- We provide mental health support, through different networks, having mental health first aiders within the business and running initiatives like our "wellbeing Wednesdays" to promote this.
- We have dedicated Early Years programmes with a focus on underrepresented groups, offering different training opportunities within the business.
- We invest in tools, like Textio, and focused I&D job boards to help us reduce bias in our job postings and recruitment activity.
- Commitment in improving diversity across our Tech Teams and working with companies to improve the tech ecosystem as a whole, specifically have committed to at least 30% Women in Tech at OVO by 2026
- We've signed up to numerous charters, like the Tech Talent Charter, Race at Work Charter and Trans in the City, to show our continuing commitment to improving I&D within OVO and the wider community
- Within OVO we have multiple belonging networks and communities set up, to offer support and forums for everybody
- Read more about our commitments to improving Diversity & Inclusion at OVO in our linked belonging report
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