Principal Cyber Security Engineer

Join to apply for the Principal Cyber Security Engineer role at UK Home Office

Salary: £76,117 plus skills allowance of up to £19,483 pending assessment

Location:
Sheffield (hybrid with 60% office attendance)

Advert Close: 11:55pm Tuesday 13th January 2026

This role requires Security Check (SC) clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. Candidates must also hold or be prepared to undergo NPPV3 clearance.

Home Office Cyber Security at the Home Office plays a vital role in protecting one of the UK’s largest government departments and its nationally critical digital infrastructure.

The Principal Engineer will lead the design, delivery, and optimisation of enterprise-wide security technologies that safeguard critical systems and data. This role is accountable for defining and maintaining security architecture, engineering standards, automation, tooling, and platform resilience, while driving innovation across cloud, infrastructure, and application security domains.

Beyond technical leadership, the role has a strong external focus; providing insight to project and programme management to inform resourcing decisions and supporting assurance teams and processes to ensure engineering outputs meet required standards. Acting as the central point of contact for engineers within your area, you will ensure that solutions are sustainable and aligned with the Government Digital Profession strategy.

Working alongside other Senior, Lead, and Principal Engineers, you will ensure technical approaches are appropriate, consistent, and endorsed. You will also engage with senior stakeholders in planning activities to establish a robust foundation for product delivery and ongoing maintenance. While your remit spans the engineering function, you will collaborate closely with Architects and other professional disciplines to deliver secure, resilient, and future-ready systems.

• Lead and oversee the engineering, deployment, and lifecycle management of security tools and platforms across cloud, network, and endpoint environments.
• Support implementation in line with strategy, leading multiple engineering teams to ensure alignment with architecture principles and professional standards.
• Plan workforce needs and recruiting civil servants, building a strong technical talent pool; provide coaching and mentoring as required.
• Enable technical decision-making, contributing to roadmaps and overall strategy for the Engineering function in your area; present decisions clearly at all organisational levels.
• Coordinate with other engineering leads to build a cohesive community, acting as the central point of contact in your area and driving collaborative efforts.

• Deep expertise in security architecture, engineering, and modern security technologies (cloud, identity, endpoint, network).
• Strong leadership and team development capability across technical engineering disciplines.
• Ability to design and implement scalable, secure-by-design solutions for complex environments.
• Proficiency in automation, orchestration, and engineering best practices (IaC, CI/CD, Dev Sec Ops ).
• Excellent stakeholder engagement, communication, and influencing skills at senior levels.
• Capability to advise on future technology changes and innovations, defining best practice for continuous improvement.
• Commitment to key engineering principles and standards, with the ability to inspire others to adopt and uphold them.
• A civil service pension with employer contribution rates of at least 28.97%.
• In-year reward scheme for one-off or sustained exceptional personal or team achievements.
• The ability to potentially adopt flexible working options that suit your work/life balance, plus the opportunity in future to take a career break.

• 25 days annual leave on appointment, rising with service.
• Eight days public holidays, plus one additional privilege day.
• 26 weeks maternity, adoption or shared parental leave at full pay, followed by 13 weeks statutory pay and a further 13 weeks unpaid, after qualifying service.
• Maternity and adoption support leave of two weeks full pay, after qualifying service.
• Paid leave for fostering approval processes, support when a child is substantively placed with you plus a foster to adopt policy.
• Support for guardians and kinship carers.
• Corporate membership of ‘Employers for Carers’ providing additional information and advice for carers, plus a ‘Carer’s Passport’ to discuss workplace needs.
• Time off to deal with emergencies and certain other unplanned special circumstances.
• The option to adopt flexible working arrangements and future career break opportunities.

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Seniority level: Mid-Senior level

Employment type: Full-time

Job function: Information Technology

Industries: Government Administration

Click on apply now to be redirected to the full job advert and our application portal.