Our Story
Hello there. We’re Zopa.
We started our journey back in 2005, building the first ever peer-to-peer lending company. Fast forward to 2020 and we launched Zopa Bank. A bank that listens to what our customers don’t like about finance and does the opposite. We’re redefining what it feels like to work in finance. Our vision for a new era of banking puts people front and centre — we’ve built a business that empowers everyone to aim high, every day, to move finance forward. Find out more about our fantastic offerings at
Zopa.com!
We’re incredibly proud of our achievements and none of it would be possible without the amazing team here. It’s not just industry awards we’re winning, we’ve also been named in the top three UK’s Most Loved Workplaces.
If you embrace unconventional challenges, are unafraid to think differently and are driven to make an outsized impact, you’ll thrive here at Zopa, so join us, and make it count. Want to see us in action? Follow us on Instagram @zopalife
The team:
Zopa’s Product Security team ensures security is baked into our products from the very start of their lifecycles, all the way to the end. We provide the more pre-emptive, design-thinking led, less response-based side of securing the bank. If we do our job right, security becomes inherent in the design of our products, rather than something grafted on after.
With you, we’ll be a Product Security team of 4, sitting within a larger InfoSec team of 18. Our current projects include ongoing security assessments and threat models of new, in-house systems (many AI-driven), improving our security tools - such as SAST and SCA, refining a SLSA strategy, as well as helping to maintain an external bounty program and a Vulnerability Disclosure Programme.
We pride ourselves in being able to collaborate and integrate seamlessly with an engineering functions. You’ll be working not only directly with your product security peers but also alongside the engineering function. Helping to design, architect and break new features and products for the bank.
A day in the life:
Being an advocate of security for product owners and engineers, with whom you'll build a working relationship.
Performing mobile, backend, and web security assessments directly
Orchestrating web, mobile, and backend security assessments
Weighing in on technical architecture discussions, ensuring security is considered from the very inception of new features
Threat modelling upcoming features, providing a more technical and hands-on steer when necessary to illustrate security concerns with proposed feature implementations
Overseeing secure engineering training programmes, keeping our engineers aware of secure engineering practices, and abreast of the common security pitfalls to avoid
Integrating security tooling, stitching together CI steps, scripts, and small tools to automate security controls and visualise their results in a helpful manner. This could include SAST, SCA, DAST, secrets scanning, vulnerability scanning, or other tooling
Being guardians of our Secure Development Lifecycle, ensuring security controls are baked in and "pushed left" as much as reasonably possible
Triaging incoming reports and findings from bug bounties, automated tools, and more
Being comfortable doing "Just-in-Time" learning around technologies and frameworks as required to understand emerging technologies in the company, and the security concerns they raise — with appropriate time allocated by the company, of course
Advising engineers on security patching, and ensuring our team does as we say by keeping our own tools patched too
Staying cognizant of the balance required between security and productivity, and how to manage stakeholder's concerns around such trade-offs
About you:
You have experience in offensive security, such as performing security assessments via tools like BurpSuite, nmap, Kali Linux, etc
Strong experience in at least web or a mobile OS, with a willingness to learn the other too
Fundamental networking and OS knowledge – you should know how to debug a failing DNS connection, comfortable with command line tools, and broader computing principles
Comfortable threat modelling, assessing the balance between features and security. Being able to explain the trade-offs to less technical stakeholders
Basic programming knowledge – we have some in-house tools we maintain ourselves alongside leveraging AI
A willingness to learn fundamental software engineering principles to ensure said tools stay maintainable, and to be confident of AI-generated results. Being confident in at least one language such as Python, JavaScript, or Go
Secure coding practices – being able to not just spot a SQL injection but provide detailed guidance about how to fix it and prevent it for future queries
Providing security advice during architectural design phases of new products. Spotting fundamental security flaws in designs early on, before code is even written
Basic cloud infrastructure knowledge, such as understanding the fundamentals of cloud compute instances (VMs), software-defined networks, and defining infrastructure in code
Added bonus:
Having experience in fintech, especially banks with mobile apps!
Able to read common tech stack languages not commonly used in InfoSec, e.g. Java and C#. This can assist whitebox assessments
On top of knowing security skills, knowing fundamental software engineering practices to ensure modifications to our internal tools stay maintainable
