Deputy CISO (Remote)

About the role

Ethos, a life insurance technology company, is looking for a Deputy CISO with a strong technical background in security architecture, engineering and operations. The role reports directly to the CISO and covers broad oversight of the security function, acting as a technical leader and escalation point for the team. It suits someone who has built and defended real systems and brings hands-on technical credibility to a senior security leadership position.

Key responsibilities

• Partner with the CISO on the security strategy, roadmap and priorities, and act as deputy and escalation point, including before executives and the board.
• Empower existing team leads while keeping the function grounded in technical reality, and build, mentor and lead security engineers and architects.
• Own security budget planning, vendor/tool evaluation and resourcing decisions with the CISO.
• Review security architecture across cloud platforms, applications, APIs and infrastructure, and lead threat modeling and architecture reviews for major systems.
• Drive secure-by-design practices in the SDLC and CI/CD pipelines with DevOps and engineering teams.
• Lead or oversee major incident responses, including root-cause analysis and remediation planning.
• Keep up with the threat landscape and emerging technologies such as AI/ML, and turn that knowledge into technical controls.
• Communicate technical risk clearly to non-technical stakeholders and executives.

Required profile

• 12+ years in security engineering, security architecture or technical security leadership, with a track record of hands-on technical work.
• Bachelor's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field.
• Proven ability to read and evaluate system architecture and code, and to lead technical incident response and security teams.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain technical risk to executives and the board.

Required skills

• Cloud security architecture (AWS) and infrastructure-as-code.
• Application security, secure software development and modern patterns (microservices, containers, APIs, zero-trust).
• Incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Preferred: prior CISO/Head of Security Engineering experience, CISSP, AI/ML security (OWASP LLM Top 10, MITRE ATLAS, NIST AI RMF), and regulated industry experience.

The US national base salary range is $185,000 - $327,000; the position is remote.