Smarkets
Lead Security Engineer (DevSecOps & CISO)
Job Description
Salary: £34,000 - 56,000 per year
Requirements:- Security expert with hands-on experience building security engineering/DevSecOps capabilities in a cloud-native, high-growth environment, ideally financial services or exchange infrastructure
- Excellent communication skills for executive, board, and regulatory audiences
- Familiarity with CFTC system safeguards expectations, including 17 C.F.R. § 38.1051 and § 39.18 or similar regulatory requirements
- Strong grasp of application security principles, including OWASP Top 10, NIST, and secure SDLC practices
- Proficiency with CI/CD tooling such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or CircleCI, and security tools such as Snyk, Aqua, Trivy, Checkov, Twistlock, or Clair
- Hands-on expertise securing AWS, Azure, or GCP, Kubernetes, containers, and IaC
- Proficiency in Python, Bash, Go, or similar
- Personal interest in sports, exchanges, or trading
- Certifications such as DSOP, CKS, CISSP, CCSP, CSSLP, or AWS/Azure/GCP Security Specialty
- Track record of security automation at scale in Agile/Scrum
- Direct experience with regulators/examiners on technology and system safeguards
- Familiarity with event contracts, prediction markets, or similar novel futures products under CFTC
- Serve as our first dedicated security engineering hire, working from within Infrastructure and Engineering teams to establish and evolve our security capabilities
- Own regulatory and industry engagement, including CFTC, reflecting external expectations in internal practice
- Define a pragmatic, risk-based security strategy across cloud infrastructure, applications, trading systems, and our corporate environment
- Lead or support the investigation, containment, and remediation of security incidents, including post-incident root cause analysis and corrective actions
- Work with Engineering teams to build security into the SDLC, including SAST, DAST, SCA, and container/IaC scanning in CI/CD, without becoming a delivery bottleneck
- Implement controls across AWS, Kubernetes, containers, and IaC, hardening identity, secrets, and network access
- Establish security monitoring and detection across applications, APIs, and infrastructure
- Develop and maintain security policies, standards, and controls meeting DCM/DCO requirements
- Maintain evidence and documentation to support regulatory examinations and audits
- Act as a security partner to engineers, building a culture of ownership over security
- AWS
- Azure
- Bash
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- DevSecOps
- DevOps
- GCP
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Support
- Jenkins
- Kubernetes
- Network
- OWASP
- Python
- Security
More:
We are Smarkets, a prediction market exchange for sports and political trading that has handled over $50 billion in volume since 2010. We are upending sports betting with fair prices, strong technology, and a superior customer experience, powered by a high-performance environment where great people thrive. This is our inaugural security hire, reporting directly to senior leadership and the Board, with responsibility for protecting our distributed, real-time trading systems and helping stand up security engineering from the ground up through go-live and beyond. We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, stock options, pension scheme, comprehensive health insurance, enhanced parental leave, daily breakfast and lunch, a cycle-to-work scheme, a £1,000 annual learning and development budget, 25 days paid leave plus bank holidays, flexible hybrid working, global working for up to 20 days a year, and regular socials, hackathons, and events. We are based in London and are an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to equality, inclusion, and a welcoming environment for all.
last updated 36 week of 2026
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About Smarkets
Smarkets
London
IT
Skills & Technologies
Inferred from job description
Salary Insight
£45,000
This role
£85,000
UK median
This salary is 47% below the UK median for Lead roles (£85,000/yr).
Based on 2024–2025 UK technology sector benchmarks