Staff Security Engineer

Team: Information Security: Engineering

Location: Berlin

Commitment: Permanent - full time

Workplace Type: hybrid

As Staff Security Engineer at PPRO, you’ll act as the technical lead for the Security Engineering (SecEng) team, driving technical and operational excellence while coaching and developing your colleagues. You’ll be pivotal in supporting our mission to build robust, secure, and resilient systems.

This role offers the opportunity to apply deep security expertise across application and cloud domains. You will serve as the primary technical interface between the SecEng team and engineers across the organisation, influencing architecture and guiding teams to embed a secure by design philosophy in everything we build. You will build Security as Code solutions that enable consistent controls and high-velocity delivery. You will also perform security assessments for new projects and technologies, utilizing threat modeling to identify risks early and define standardized, repeatable security patterns for the wider engineering organization. If you thrive on finding win-win solutions that embed security into modern development workflows to safeguard our customers, this is a great opportunity to have a positive impact at scale across the payments ecosystem.

What you’ll do:

• Act as technical lead for the Security Engineering team, setting technical direction, coaching and mentoring other security engineers.
• Partner with Engineering teams to integrate security principles, practices, and tools into all stages of the software development lifecycle.
• Design and build reusable Security as Code artefacts and patterns that reduce developer friction while improving security outcomes.
• Conduct threat modeling exercises and security assessments to identify and address risks in critical applications and systems.
• Write Hardening Standards and Security Guidelines for various technologies and processes.
• Develop automations for recurrent and manual tasks around auditing activities, cloud security posture management (CSPM) and other security processes.
• Maintain and expand our IaC codebase and CI/CD pipelines.
• Champion the use of AI to streamline security operations, scaling our defensive capabilities and enabling non-security teams to adopt security-first practices.
• Collaborate on cross-functional security projects, enhancing PPRO’s security posture at scale.
• Continuously monitor emerging security trends and technologies to drive proactive improvements.

What we look for in you:

• A natural technical leader: able to guide, coach and mentor engineers, lead cross-team collaborations, and act as a trusted interface between security and the wider engineering organisation.
• You view AI as an essential force multiplier; you are a power user who actively leverages modern AI/LLM frameworks to both accelerate your own workflows and build scalable security solutions.
• Solid understanding of software engineering fundamentals, secure software development best practices and security architecture.
• Strong expertise in AWS (GCP is a bonus) and container security (e.g. Kubernetes).
• Deep understanding of DevSecOps and CI/CD security controls, with hands-on experience in Infrastructure as Code (preferably Terraform), CI/CD pipelines (preferably GitHub Actions) and scripting (Python, bash).
• Results-oriented, highly collaborative, pragmatic and proactive, and with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, able to unblock teams and foster security awareness throughout the company.