Cyber Assurance Lead (Cloud & AI) - #2172636

Security Assurance Lead - Cloud & AI

Permanent | Belfast or London (Hybrid) | SC Held or Eligible

Morela is hiring a Security Assurance Lead for a fast-growing UK sovereign AI scale-up. This is a permanent, full-time role, hybrid from either Belfast or London, reporting into the Security Lead. You will need to hold SC clearance or be eligible to obtain it. On offer is a competitive salary, pension, equity options and one of the most generous working patterns you will find anywhere.

About the Client

Our client builds a sovereign AI platform for organisations that can't compromise on security, including defence, national security, central government, policing and heavily regulated industries. They deliver real capability into some of the UK's most sensitive environments, so every feature is threat modelled, hardened and properly assured before it goes near customer data.

Security is central to the business and is now getting serious investment. The company is scaling a dedicated assurance function so it can assure fast without slowing delivery down, and this hire is one of the founding roles in it.

The Role

You will be the independent assurance voice across the business, covering the cloud estate, the corporate environment and the AI capability built into the platform. You will set the security baselines that DevOps, IT and Product Security Engineering build to, then prove those baselines are being met through continuous monitoring and independent testing. Self-attestation won't be accepted as proof.

The scope is wide and will keep growing. You will work with engineering, product, IT, commercial and leadership, and directly with customers, so the role suits someone curious and self-driven who wants a real hand in shaping how a security function grows and directly influencing new capability for defence.

Responsibilities

• Help shape and deliver the overall security strategy, and play a key part in building out the assurance function as the business grows
• Set the security baselines for cloud, IT and product teams, and verify compliance against them independently
• Specify the evidence security testing needs to produce, and assure the processes and pipelines used to build the product
• Embed, integrate and continually improve security tooling across the full SDLC
• Independently test and verify platform-level AI controls, including prompt injection defences, agent permissions, provisioning guardrails and isolation, and own the baseline evidence pack
• Produce AI risk assessments and security posture reporting aligned to ISO 42001, the EU AI Act and the Cyber Resilience Act
• Support the running and upkeep of ISO 27001 and the wider enterprise compliance management systems
• Champion good security practice across engineering teams

Essential Requirements

• Hands-on experience implementing and maturing CNAPP tooling such as Wiz
• Practical cloud security experience on at least one major hyperscaler, with a solid grasp of infrastructure, cloud and application security
• A track record of building assurance through continuous monitoring or automated evidence collection
• Experience running, auditing and developing ISO-based management systems, alongside broader governance, risk and compliance work
• Working knowledge of NIST frameworks
• Practical use of AI security and control frameworks such as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and MITRE ATLAS
• A drive to deliver rigorous assurance quickly and at scale
• SC clearance, or eligibility to obtain it

Desirable Experience

• CISSP and/or CCSP certification
• ISO 42001 implementation, audit or certification experience
• Hands-on security testing of LLM applications or agentic AI systems
• Python or other scripting used in a security context
• Compliance-as-code or machine-readable compliance formats such as OSCAL

Working Environment

• Permanent, full-time, hybrid from Belfast or London
• Competitive salary, company pension and equity options in a high-growth scale-up
• A working pattern that gives back around 30 extra days a year on top of annual leave, with full four-day weeks over the summer and December, regular paid Fridays off and early Friday finishes
• Cutting-edge AI tools used as everyday working kit
• A delivery-first culture that values impact over optics and people over politics, with real influence on how the business runs as it grows

Interested? Get in touch with Adam Moore at with your CV and current availability.