About Us
Operating from Abu Dhabi since 1985, our client provides personal and business banking services across retail banking, wealth management, commercial banking, corporate finance, investment banking, and cash management. The institution supports a broad financial‑services ecosystem where resilient technology, secure digital operations, and disciplined risk management are essential to protecting customers, transactions, and business continuity.
Its scale and service breadth create a demanding environment for cyber security professionals, with engineering teams contributing directly to the assurance of critical banking platforms and emerging technologies.
Job Description
The Senior Manager, Cyber Security Engineers will lead the development and operation of a continuous security‑validation capability across the banking environment. The role will convert threat intelligence and approved adversarial scenarios into automated, repeatable tests covering cloud services, infrastructure, artificial intelligence systems, and model supply chains.
Success will be measured by stronger threat coverage, faster remediation, reliable deployment gates, and clear executive reporting. You will guide engineering delivery, coordinate with security governance stakeholders, and maintain an effective first‑line validation model while preserving the second line of defence's responsibility for independent red teaming and unknown‑scenario assessment.
This position requires a leader who can combine strategic direction with technical credibility, establish measurable operating standards, and ensure that security findings are resolved before material changes are approved for release.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the strategy, roadmap, and day‑to‑day operation of continuous cyber security control validation.
- Direct automated testing across cloud platforms, enterprise infrastructure, AI applications, large‑language‑model use cases, and model supply chains.
- Translate second‑line‑approved threat scenarios into a structured coverage matrix and maintain alignment with business risk.
- Manage the ingestion of MITRE ATLAS and OWASP LLM threat intelligence, using Jira automation to meet the seven‑day service‑level agreement for new techniques.
- Turn emerging attack methods into practical validation test cases and ensure they are deployed within the agreed operational timeframe.
- Oversee the aggregation, deduplication, ownership, and lifecycle management of findings through platforms such as DefectDojo and Attestation.
- Set severity‑based remediation targets and enforce mean‑time‑to‑remediate gates before re‑deployment approval.
- Partner with engineering, architecture, risk, and technology teams to resolve material weaknesses and improve control effectiveness.
- Maintain Power BI reporting for open findings, remediation performance, pipeline‑gate pass rates, threat coverage, and prompt‑injection block rates.
- Provide concise management information on exposure, trends, exceptions, overdue actions, and deployment assurance.
- Establish quality standards for validation evidence, test repeatability, scenario traceability, and audit readiness.
- Keep first‑line control validation clearly separated from second‑line independent red teaming, escalation, and challenge activities.
Requirements
- Extensive experience leading cyber security engineering, offensive security, adversarial validation, or comparable assurance functions within a complex enterprise.
- Demonstrable success replacing periodic manual penetration testing with continuous or automated control‑validation practices.
- Strong technical understanding of cloud security, infrastructure security, application delivery pipelines, and security testing automation.
- Practical experience with autonomous penetration‑testing platforms, including AWS Security Agent, Horizon3, or equivalent technologies.
- Hands‑on familiarity with AI red‑teaming tools such as Garak, PyRIT, Claude Security or Opus 4.x, and Codex.
- Proven ability to design or manage testing aligned with the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS.
- Experience operationalising threat intelligence into repeatable security tests, engineering workflows, and measurable service levels.
- Knowledge of finding‑management processes, vulnerability prioritisation, remediation governance, and deployment approval controls.
- Ability to define meaningful security metrics and communicate technical risk through dashboards and executive‑level reporting.
- Clear understanding of first‑line and second‑line responsibilities, including the boundary between control validation and independent red teaming.
- Capability to lead technical specialists, set delivery expectations, review evidence quality, and influence senior stakeholders.
- Experience in financial services, banking, or another highly regulated environment would be advantageous.
Benefits
- Lead a high‑impact cyber security capability protecting services that support personal, commercial, corporate, and investment banking activities.
- Shape the transition from periodic testing to continuous, intelligence‑led validation across cloud, infrastructure, and AI environments.
- Work with modern offensive‑security and AI‑assurance tooling, including automated testing, threat‑intelligence feeds, and engineering workflow integrations.
- Gain direct visibility of risk trends, remediation performance, and deployment assurance at senior management level.
- Influence operating models, governance boundaries, engineering standards, and measurable security outcomes.
- Build and develop a specialist team working on technically complex challenges within a regulated financial institution.
- Access a broad environment for professional growth across cyber security engineering, banking technology, cloud assurance, and AI risk.
- Receive a competitive package aligned with the seniority and strategic importance of the position.
Other
The role is based in Abu Dhabi and offers the opportunity to influence cyber security assurance across a long‑established banking institution. Candidates should be comfortable operating between strategy and delivery, challenging existing testing models, and creating practical controls that work at deployment speed.
Applications are particularly relevant from leaders who have delivered continuous validation, offensive security automation, cloud assurance, or AI security programmes. Experience working within regulated environments and coordinating effectively with independent risk or red‑team functions will be highly valued.
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