Associate Engineering Manager - Security (d/f/m)

Our story:

Every year millions of people are either filing their taxes in fear or giving up on their tax refund altogether. We're working on fixing that. Our intuitive app enables anyone, regardless of education or background, to file their taxes with newfound confidence.

Spread across Germany, Spain and the UK, the team at Taxfix Group with its brands Taxfix and Steuerbot, is a compassionate group of solution-finders. We speak our minds openly, and with over 400 professionals, including tax experts, developers, and IT security experts, we're rich in ideas and voices. The group has facilitated more than 3.5 billion euros in tax refunds for its customers since its founding in 2016.

The opportunity :

Lead Product Security at Taxfix - a fintech platform serving millions of users. You'll own the security function end-to-end: strategy, tooling, and a small but growing team (currently two Security Engineers). This role is part hands-on security engineering and part emerging people leadership. You'll build alongside your team while growing into an engineering management role, with structured coaching and support from your senior manager.

Your responsibilities and decisions:

Lead and grow the team

• Hire, coach, and develop Security Engineers - run meaningful 1:1s, set development goals, and actively manage performance

• Build a high-performance team culture rooted in psychological safety, ownership, and continuous improvement

• Champion AI adoption within the team - encourage AI-assisted workflows for security work (threat modeling, detection engineering, vulnerability triage) and continuously raise the bar on how AI is used to improve productivity

• Evaluate capacity, balance reactive vs. proactive security work, and advocate for the resources your team needs

Own delivery and security posture

• Own the team's outcomes against OKRs: prioritize effectively, track progress with metrics, and delegate without micromanaging

• Own the technical direction for Product Security: application security, AI security, cloud security posture

• Ensure rigorous vulnerability management, incident response, and security-in-SDLC practices

Shape security strategy

• Partner with Technical Leadership and Architecture to align security work with the broader technology strategy

• Own and evolve the security tooling stack: driving consolidation and effectiveness across the Taxfix group

• Support AI security needs: LLM security risks, adversarial testing, secure integration patterns, and AI threat modeling

• Evaluate technical trade-offs: balancing risk, cost, developer experience, and delivery speed, and communicate them clearly to stakeholders, framing impact in business terms, not just technical severity

Partner across the org

• Bridge your team and its stakeholders: Product Engineering, AI Engineering, Platform, Data, and Architecture - embedding security early in the development lifecycle

• Align priorities with peer EMs across Platform Engineering

• Proactively surface blockers, manage dependencies, and keep information flowing

• Communicate security posture, risks, and trade-offs clearly to engineering leadership and, where relevant, to compliance, legal, and executive stakeholders

Your profile:

Must have:

• 8+ years in application security, DevSecOps, or security engineering with strong hands-on depth

• Tech lead, team lead, or early management experience — with a clear desire to grow into engineering management and openness to being coached

• Track record of leading technical initiatives end-to-end: scoping, executing, and rollout

• Strong understanding of cloud security across at least one major provider (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure transferable), with multi-cloud experience as a plus

• Experience with security tooling: CNAPP/CSPM platforms, vulnerability scanners, SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, and penetration testing coordination

• Familiarity with cloud-native technologies (Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code) sufficient to embed security controls into modern delivery pipelines

• Familiarity with AI security — LLM security risks, adversarial testing, secure integration patterns

• Active user of AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Copilot, Cursor, or similar)

• Track record of driving outcomes using metrics, OKRs, or KPIs

• Systems and outcomes mindset — able to prioritize the work that matters most and say no to the rest

• Effective communicator across engineering, product, and leadership audiences — including framing risk in business terms for non-security audiences

Nice to have:

• Experience working in regulated environments

• Exposure to incident response coordination at scale, including post-mortem leadership

• Background in threat modeling programs at engineering org scale

• Experience supporting AI/ML workloads from a security angle (model supply chain, prompt injection defenses, agent guardrails)

Why Taxfix?

• A chance to do meaningful, people-centric work with an international team of passionate professionals.

• Holistic well-being with free mental health coaching sessions and yoga.

• A monthly allowance to spend on an extensive range of services that you can use and roll over as flexibly as you like.

• Employee stock options for all employees—because everyone deserves to benefit from the success they help to create.

• 30 annual vacation days and flexible working hours.

• Work from abroad for up to six weeks every year. Just align with your team, and then enjoy your trip.

• Plenty of opportunities to socialise as a team. In addition to internal tech meetups, our international team hosts regular get-togethers - virtually and in person when possible.

• Free tax declaration filing, of course, through the Taxfix app - and internal support for all personal tax-related questions.

• Have a four-legged friend in your life? We’re happy to have dogs join us in the office.

Excited? So are we. Learn more about Team Taxfix on our blog and get a glimpse of our culture.

At Taxfix, we believe that incredible things happen when you have a wealth of perspectives and experiences. We're proudly committed to equal employment and development opportunities no matter your gender, race, religion, age, sexual orientation, colour, disability, or place of origin. To help mitigate any potential unconscious biases, we ask that you refrain from including your picture, age, or marital status on your CV. Let your experiences speak for themselves.

Not sure if you meet all the requirements for this role? Please apply anyway. You might bring something special to the team that we hadn't considered previously.