About this job opportunity

Our Vision

To be the world's most trusted global payroll partner, simplifying pay for all employees.

Our Mission

Empowering global workforces with seamless, compliant, and innovative payroll and payment solutions, enabling businesses to thrive in a connected world.

Our People

Our fundamental beliefs at CloudPay are built on core values of professionalism, passion, empowerment, innovation, and teamwork. We value our employees and strive to create a great workplace where everyone is valued, heard, inspired, and encouraged to bring their authentic selves to work. We're committed to providing an excellent employee experience through fulfilling projects, empowerment to make a difference, and an environment that inspires innovation.

What makes this role exciting
The Security Architect is a critical leadership role ensuring that our technology, cloud platform, and global operations are secured by design, comply with rigorous global standards, and are guided by a robust security program.

CloudPay is seeking an experienced Security Architect to play a strategic role in shaping and governing the security architecture of its global, cloud native payroll and payments platform. This role combines deep technical expertise with strong architectural governance and leadership responsibilities.

The Enterprise Security Architect will be accountable for defining security architecture across identity and access management, AWS and Azure cloud environments, and AI enabled services, while also providing formal architectural assurance through chairing the Architecture Review Board (ARB). The role will further act as a senior delegate for the Chief Security & Risk Officer, representing security at the Responsible AI & Ethics Committee.

Main responsibilities

Security Architecture & Strategy

• Define and maintain CloudPay's security architecture vision, principles, standards, and roadmaps.
• Ensure security architecture aligns with business objectives, regulatory expectations, and risk appetite.
• Design secure, scalable patterns for APIs, data platforms, AI workloads, and cloud-native services.
• Provide authoritative security architecture guidance across engineering, platform, and data teams.

Identity & Access Management (IAM)

• Own the security architecture for workforce and customer identity platforms.
• Drive adoption of zero trust principles, strong authentication, least privilege access, and secure identity lifecycle management.
• Provide architectural oversight for single sign-on, federation, privileged access management, and conditional access controls.
• Define and assess future operating models to ensure robust lifecycle management for Identity & Access management exists for CloudPay globally.
• Collaborate closely with Identity Partners to ensure design and technologies align to CloudPay's 3- A's strategy which includes Automation, API's and AI.

Cloud Security (AWS & Azure)

• Lead security architecture across AWS and Azure, including identity, networking, encryption, monitoring, and workload protection.
• Define security guardrails and reference designs using cloud-native services and infrastructure-as-code.
• Support secure migration, modernization, and continuous improvement of cloud platforms.
• Ensure continues best practice security principles are applied to cloud platforms deployed by CloudPay and ensure any remediation activities are prioritized by adopting a risk-based approach.

AI & Emerging Technology Security

• Design and review security controls for AI/ML systems, including training data protection, model integrity, access control, and inference security working in conjunction with compliance, security and data privacy teams to ensure controls are appropriate and effective to ensure customer, employee and commercially sensitive data has confidentiality, integrity and availability maintained.
• Assess and advise on risks associated with generative AI, third-party AI platforms, and internal AI use cases.
• Support responsible, ethical, and compliant adoption of AI technologies from a security and risk perspective.

Architecture Governance & Assurance

• Chair the Security Architecture Review Board (SARB), ensuring consistent, transparent, and risk-informed architectural decision-making.
• Review and approve security-relevant architectural designs, exceptions, and risk trade-offs.
• Ensure architecture decisions are documented, traceable, and aligned to enterprise standards.
• Ensure all platforms, infrastructure, architectures and models are documented and regularly maintained.

Responsible AI & Ethics Leadership

• Deputize for the Chief Security & Risk Officer and Director of Compliance at the Responsible AI & Ethics Committee.
• Provide expert security and risk input into AI governance, ethical assessments, and AI assurance decisions.
• Contribute to policies, controls, and oversight mechanisms for responsible AI use.

Risk, Compliance & Assurance

• Ensure security designs support compliance with applicable regulations and standards (e.g. ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR).
• Lead threat modeling, security design reviews, and material risk assessments.
• Support audit, certification, and regulatory activities through well-evidenced architecture and governance artefacts.

Stakeholder Engagement & Leadership

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders, product teams, and executive stakeholders.
• Influence outcomes through strong communication, pragmatism, and technical authority.
• Mentor security engineers and architects and promote security-by-design across the organisation.
• Act as the Subject Matter Expert (SME), partnering with Enterprise Risk Management, Legal, Internal Audit, Product, and Engineering teams to ensure security requirements are understood and met across the business.

Experience needed for this role

Essential

• Extensive experience in security architecture, cloud security engineering, or senior security leadership roles.
• Proven track record securing large-scale, cloud-native SaaS platforms, ideally in regulated environments.
• Demonstrated experience operating within formal architecture governance frameworks.
• Experience engaging with senior leadership, risk committees, and multidisciplinary decision-making forums.
• Strong understanding of balancing security risk, business enablement, and delivery velocity.

Technical Experience & Skills

Identity & Access Management

• Deep experience in IAM architecture for both workforce and customer identities.
• Strong understanding of modern authentication, authorization, and access governance.
• Practical application of zero trust and identity-centric security models.

Cloud Platforms

• Advanced knowledge of AWS and Azure security architectures and native security services.
• Experience designing secure cloud networking, segmentation, encryption, and monitoring.
• Familiarity with containerized, serverless, and platform-as-a-service security patterns.

AI & Data Security

• Knowledge of security risks across AI/ML lifecycles, including data ingestion, training, and inference.
• Experience evaluating AI-related threats such as data leakage, prompt injection, and model abuse.
• Understanding of AI governance and assurance concepts from a security perspective.

Secure Engineering & DevSecOps

• Experience embedding security into SDLC, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong threat modeling, security design review, and architecture documentation skills.

Communication & Architecture Leadership

• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Confident written and verbal communication suitable for executive, risk, and governance forums.

Desirable Qualifications

• Security or cloud certifications (e.g. CISSP, SABSA, AWS/Azure Security).
• Experience in payments, payroll, financial services, or other highly regulated industries.
• Exposure to AI governance frameworks or ethical technology initiatives.
• Architectural Fluency: Ability to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into concrete, actionable security controls and technical architecture designs.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to communicate complex security risks and technical concepts clearly to both technical teams and executive leadership.
• Analytical & Problem-Solving: Proven ability to manage multiple priorities, conduct thorough risk assessments, and drive pragmatic, risk-based remediation strategies.

About you and Our core values

• Taking ownership, working with integrity and respect
• Being a team player is key to our culture
• Solution and customer focused
• Great initiative with the goal for excellence in achieving results
• Dedicated to developing and always looking for continuous improvements
• Be creative, be committed, be engaged and enjoy what you do

UK Package and benefits

• Competitive Salary
• Competitive vacation allowance
• Calm app
• WFH Allowance
• Life Assurance
• Private Medical Insurance
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• EAP
• Eye Tests & Glasses Contribution
• Simplyhealth Enhanced Health Plan
• Pension Scheme
• Give-As-You-Earn (GAYE)
• Employee Referral Program
• CloudPay NOW
• Paid Volunteering days
• Marriage Leave
• Bereavement Leave
• Vacation Purchase Plan

CloudPay is committed to being an equal opportunities employer.
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The CloudPay culture is built upon on five core values, from which we develop our service, our technology and our business strategies. Our fundamental beliefs are a promise to our employees, customers and partners, built on the core values of professionalism, passion, empowerment, innovation, and teamwork.
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