Security Architect

Salary - £62,900.00 - £100,000.00 

Contract type - Permanent 

Working pattern - The Partnership has adopted a hybrid working approach, meaning you'll be able to work a mixture between the London head office and home based upon your personal needs whilst balancing the needs of the business.

The John Lewis Partnership (JLP) continually invests in its security capabilities, recognizing the trust our customers place in our brand and the information they provide to us. The Partnership is accelerating the use of data and insight to enhance the experience and relevance our Partners and technology systems provide to our customers. Working as an integrated team member or as an advisor to service and domain teams, this role is responsible for designing security solutions, patterns, and blueprints across our data, platforms, cloud, and network capabilities to support our strategic intent within an ever-changing threat landscape.

Key Responsibilities

• Design End-to-End Security Solutions: Create effective, efficient, repeatable, and sustainable security solutions and patterns across cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and traditional hosting environments to make a tangible difference to business security.

• Embed Best Practice & Reduce Risk: Ensure security architecture best practices are brought to bear during solution design activities undertaken by delivery teams and third parties to reduce delivery cost, operational risk, and technical debt.

• Democratize Secure Delivery: Enable architects and engineers across the enterprise through clear design principles, patterns, blueprints, and guardrails to help scale and democratize secure delivery.

• Provide Commercial & Contractual Counsel: Advise and consult on the commercial and contractual implications of existing or new obligations, specifically reviewing contractual terms of technologies and business services being procured within your domain.

• Drive Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with the CISO function, architecture, and engineering teams to ensure security capabilities bring intended value, actively optimizing opportunities through solution evangelism.

• Monitor & Advise on Industry Trends: Stay up-to-date with shifts in technology, retail, and socio-economic trends, influencing internal technology and business decisions to support JLP's long-term strategic aims.

Essential skills/experience you’ll need

• Modern Security Architecture Expertise: Extensive experience taking roadmap intent and combining it with good practice with business context and strong stakeholder engagement to define clear, outcome-focused solutions.

• Agile & Technical Architecture Delivery: An adaptable, engineering-focused mindset with proven experience working across multiple service and domain teams through Agile and domain-based delivery models.

• Core Security Frameworks & Methodologies: Practical experience facilitating threat modeling workshops, working within DevSecOps/SecOps environments, applying Zero Trust philosophies, and utilizing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

• Hybrid-Cloud & Infrastructure Knowledge: Expert knowledge of securing data and workloads across Google Cloud/Workspace, Amazon Web Services, Zscaler, and commodity SaaS applications.

• Critical Influence & Leadership: Proven ability to empower and influence others to make decisions, resolve challenges, and deliver outcomes that line up with the overarching business strategy.

• Emerging Tech & Threat Awareness: A strong understanding of attacker tools, techniques, and procedures (alongside pragmatic mitigations) and practical experience securing AI/LLM deployments.

Desirable skills/experience you may have

• Advanced Architecture Frameworks: Experience designing SOC architectures (SIEM, SOAR, vulnerability management) and defining secure development lifecycles (SDLC).

• Regulated Environments & Evaluation: Experience working within regulated environments (such as PCI-DSS) and leading product evaluation and tool selection processes.

• Professional Certifications: Industry-recognized credentials such as TOGAF, SABSA, CISSP, CCSP, ISSAP, CEH, or platform-specific certifications (GCP Professional Cloud Architect/Security Engineer, Zscaler Zero Trust Associate, CSA Trusted AI Safety Expert).

• Retail Business Domain Knowledge: An understanding of retail business capabilities and processes, with the ability to benchmark against marketplace good practice to drive competitive advantage.

We’re the largest employee owned business in the UK and home of our cherished brands, John Lewis and Waitrose. We’re not just employees, we’re Partners, driven by our purpose to build a happier world. As we look to our future, there’s never been a more exciting time to join us.  

We’re ruthlessly focused on being brilliant at retail. We continue to innovate, adapt and diversify. Never Knowingly Undersold on price, quality and service in John Lewis and passionately serving food-lovers in Waitrose.   

As Partners we all share the responsibility of ownership and in its rewards. We use our voices to contribute to our success, working together through the good and challenging times, holding true to our behaviours and treating everyone with kindness and respect. 

We all own making the Partnership somewhere we belong. Embracing our differences and creating an environment where we’re free to be ourselves and can THRIVE. Growing ourselves individually, and as a collective. 

As Partners, we make all the difference. And, we all own it.  

Important points to note:  

It’s important to note that some of our roles are subject to pre-employment vetting (which may include DBS checks for successful candidates). If required, you’ll be informed and provided with information about vetting during the recruitment process and we encourage you to complete any vetting documents quickly to avoid delays. Any DBS checks required will be carried out by a third-party registered body and financial probity checks may also be required for some of our roles.  

We occasionally close vacancies early in the event we receive a high volume of applications, and therefore, we recommend you apply early. If you require a reasonable adjustment due to a disability which means you may need longer to complete your application please contact us as soon as possible.

We want all of our Partners to have a good work-life balance and we support flexible working. This might mean flexible or compressed hours, job sharing or shorter hour contracts, where possible. Please discuss this further with the hiring manager during your interview. 

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