The role as leader of the ministry’s team of 50 cyber advisory and assurance professionals comes with remit to provide expert advice to major projects and support security best practice
The Ministry of Defence is offering a salary in excess of £100,000 in its bid to recruit a top cyber consultant to advise on the rollout of the department’s most potentially perilous projects.
The position as head of cyber security advisory and assurance sits at the head of a team of 50 people “that operates across the Ministry of Defence to provide strategic cybersecurity consultancy and assurance services for high-risk programmes and capabilities”. This will involve efforts to “ensure that appropriate security controls are implemented in accordance with threat and risk profile”, according to the job advert.
The expert team works with those overseeing major programmes “to resolve complex cybersecurity challenges, discuss assurance and consultancy findings, and to drive implementation of actions to improve cybersecurity”.
Beyond the ministry itself, the chosen candidate will “establish, lead and run an in-house defence-wide information security consultancy service including front door process, resource management and metrics production”.
The postholder will also oversee “the pan-defence cybersecurity assurance service through which high risk existing and new defence equipment capabilities will be scrutinised against… baseline cybersecurity standards”.
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Other duties of the role include spearheading the ministry’s implementation of secure-by-design principles and serving be “a key member of the Cyber Defence and Risk leadership team” of the MoD. The chosen applicant will also “work collaboratively with the security architecture team to ensure equipment and IT programmes are adopting the latest security design patterns and are driving standardisation”.
The new recruit will join the ministry at a time when “Strategic Command is going through a significant transformation programme” – which may affect the scope and duties of the role.
“As a consequence of this, all posts within Strategic Command Headquarters and in time the wider organisation, are/will be subject to review and potential changes as we continuously improve across the period of the transformation programme,” the advert says. “These changes may be minor or could be more substantive and will generate new opportunities. Throughout, the command’s transformation programme is committed to following the MoD’s framework on managing and supporting people through the change process and places an emphasis on early and open consultation and engagement with the command’s personnel and trade unions.”
The position is listed with a salary of £76,000 to £107,000 and will be based at either MoD headquarters in Westminster, or the Defence Digital HQ at the Corsham facility operated by Strategic Command.
Applications are open until 11:55 pm on 10 November.
