VP, Platform & Security Architecture

Department: Cyber Services and Capabilities

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: GBR Manchester Hardman Boulevard

Reporting To: Damien Childs

Location: UK / Hybrid

Function: Global Leadership - Platform, Security & Architecture

VP, Platform & Security Architecture

This senior leadership role is responsible for shaping and driving NCC Group's Platform and Security Architecture strategy across all platforms that have commercial or revenue impact, including those which are client facing or used in the delivery of billable services.

This senior leadership role will lead enterprise wide adoption of architectural standards of client facing professional and managed services platforms, material improvements in platform resilience, security and scalability, delivery of high value innovation initiatives, increased client confidence and stronger presales conversion and improvements in operational efficiency.

The role with lead a global team of architects and provides deep technical leadership while setting architectural standards, influencing platform evolution, and guiding strategic decision making across engineering, operations and product.

Act as the recognised subject matter authority in cyber platform engineering, cloud security and advanced detection technologies, with extensive experience engaging and advising at C suite level driving shareholder value, strengthening shareholder confidence, and shaping enterprise decisions through strong commercial and technical insight.

With proven experience leading engineering functions within professional and managed services organisations, this role provides strategic technology leadership, defining and executing platform strategies which strengthen competitive advantage, enhance customer value, improve operational performance and contribute to long term shareholder confidence.

• Serve as the CTO level architectural authority for NCC Group's client facing platform estate, defining the future direction of the Group's platform and cyber capabilities.
• Define and govern architectural standards for all NCC Group professional service and managed service platforms, ensuring a unified, scalable and secure technology foundation across the organisation.
• Maintain a close partnership with the VP, Global Technical Services (GTS) to ensure all security architecture decisions and designs align with and adhere to Group IT principles and standards.
• When required, lead high complexity customer workshops spanning consulting, implementation, technical assurance and managed services, and support strategic sales opportunities by providing authoritative architectural direction and senior level technical assurance.
• Whilst an initial focus of the role prioritises GMS platforms, MXDR capabilities and cyber tooling ecosystems, the remit of this role extends to the full NCC Group platform estate, shaping end to end platform strategy for the Group, including Professional Services Automation (PSA) software.
• Partner with senior leadership to set long term technology strategy and innovation pathways, ensuring alignment with Group objectives and market evolution.
• Lead the evaluation and integration of emerging technologies, including AI/ML enhanced detection, workflow automation, and next generation platform engineering capabilities.
• Design multitenant platform architectures, secure cloud patterns, integration models and advanced telemetry pipelines to support Group wide solutions.
• Develop reference architectures, design patterns and engineering frameworks used across SecDevOps, Cyber Defence and broader platform engineering teams.
• Provide senior level oversight for complex or atypical deployments, such as hybrid estates, containerised workloads, multicloud environments and high risk or regulated customer verticals by enabling and guiding the architecture team to resolve technical challenges. While the team handles the majority of technical issues, this role serves as the ultimate escalation point for the most critical or strategically significant scenarios.
• Provide deep technical guidance to engineering teams covering design decisions, platform hardening, security patterns and infrastructure as code best practices.
• Drive the exploration, prototyping and validation of advanced cyber defence capabilities such as threat analytics, autonomous detection, workflow automation and AI augmented security operations, ensuring these innovations are assessed through rigorous cost-benefit and feasibility analysis to support NCC Group's strategic outcomes.
• Partner with platform engineering to mature AI driven workflows, including summarisation, detection generation, anomaly analysis and autonomous response models, ensuring all developments deliver measurable value, operational efficiency and strategic alignment with NCC Group's long term platform vision.
• Provide senior level architectural advisory support across engineering, operations, product, commercial and executive functions, ensuring that platform strategy is coherent, scalable and aligned with NCC Group's long term direction.

• Significant demonstrable experience in defining and leading global engineering strategy for professional and managed services platforms, including technologies such as Splunk, ServiceNow, Cyber HQ and other large scale operational, monitoring and automation platforms.
• Strong planning and organisational skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities.
• Effective communication skills, able to convey complex information clearly to different audiences.
• Strong stakeholder management and relationship building capabilities.
• Problem solving and analytical thinking, with sound judgement and decision making.
• Ability to work autonomously while collaborating effectively across teams.
• High attention to detail and commitment to quality and accuracy.
• Adaptability and resilience in a fast paced, changing environment.
• Proactive approach to identifying risks, issues, and improvement opportunities.
• Any other reasonable duties as required by management from time to time.

• Focus on Clients & Customers
• Work as One NCC
• Always Learning
• Inclusive & Respectful
• Deliver Brilliantly