Security Control Engineer

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology.

We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more.

We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026.

This is a full-time, permanent position based in our Lisbon office, requiring four days a week onsite.

Thought Machine is in search of a Security Control Engineer with experience in evaluating threats and risks in an organisation, evaluating control requirements, and using that information to design and implement technical and operational solutions to address them.

Thought Machine prides itself in being an engineering-led company and as such, the candidate should have a strong technical background; they should be able to reason about complex security problems in distributed cloud-based and on-premise computing environments. They should be able to communicate and collaborate on trade-offs between differing approaches to security controls - both internally and to our client base, where necessary.

Thought Machine’s Security Control Engineering team uses Thought Machine’s standards and risk assessments along with client and regulatory requirements to define the security control needs and develops those controls - inclusive of engineering the solution, documenting it, and presenting it to clients and auditors. This focus is to ensure Thought Machine is able to meet its contractual requirements, security and business continuity certifications, and maintaining a program of continuous improvement that puts us at the forefront of industry good practices.

This focus is driven by four principles:

• Experience designing and implementing technical solutions to deliver security controls and capabilities in cloud-based infrastructure (e.g. AWS, GCP).

• Experience in working directly with software engineering teams in designing new technical solutions to meet security requirements in products.

• Experience with control automation via code (e.g. Python, Go)

• Strong technical background, with experience in distributed systems, cloud security, and related technologies, and a passion for finding creative solutions to difficult problems.

• Knowledge of threat modelling for the purposes of understanding threat probabilities and frequency.

• Excellent communication skills with an ability to translate technical and security jargon into business-relevant insights.

• Ability to collaborate effectively with other departments and external stakeholders.

• Experience in a fast-paced tech environment or fintech sector.

• Knowledge of container security, Kubernetes, Kafka, and other emergent technologies.

• Experience with obtaining and maintaining a security certification such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS.

• Proficiency in leading security risk assessments, preferably with knowledge of the FAIR framework