Software Development Manager - Application Security

Clio is the global leader in legal AI technology, empowering legal professionals and law firms of every size to work smarter, faster, and more securely. 

We are transforming the legal experience for all by bettering the lives of legal professionals while increasing access to justice.

Summary:

The Role

Clio is building an agentic Security Operations Center. Instead of staffing a room of analysts to watch dashboards, we're building the AI-driven system that does the watching: it triages alerts, investigates, and takes the first response action, so the humans on the team spend their time on the work that needs a human. Our goal is to automate every event we can, and we mean every event.

We're looking for the manager who builds both the Blue Team's software and the team itself. This is an engineering leadership role first. The team writes software: detection pipelines, automated response, the agents, and the integrations that tie them into Clio's products and infrastructure. You'll lead that team, set its technical direction, and stay close enough to the code to review it and contribute. Beyond leading, you'll get into the codebase and make changes in the agentic SOC and Clio's core applications, accelerated by Claude and Codex.

You won't be working alone. Clio's Red Team finds and exploits weaknesses; the Threat Intelligence function tracks who is targeting us and how. The Blue Team takes what both of them learn and turns it into defenses that hold: hardened infrastructure, hardened product, and detection that catches the next attempt automatically.

Building the Team

As you onboard, one of the first tasks will be building out the team. We care much more about finding the right people than filling seats quickly, and you'll own that search: defining what great looks like, interviewing, and selling the work to people who have plenty of options.

The people we want are builders who are curious about security, or security people who build. You'll set the culture for a small, senior-leaning team that ships, owns the results, and makes its work visible to the rest of the company.

A Day in the Life

• AI-assisted code writing in core Clio applications to add observability to the system
• Sitting with the Red Team after an exercise to turn their findings into detections and fixes, then confirming the fixes hold on retest
• Reading a new threat intel brief on a technique being used against SaaS companies, and deciding which part of the infrastructure to harden first
• Working with a product engineering team to ensure incoming changes do not weaken the security posture of the application
• Spotting a spike in suspicious account activity, and asking why a human noticed it before the automation did
• Interviewing a candidate, then writing up honest feedback the same afternoon
• Reviewing PRs from SOC agents, and developers from engineering teams at Clio to ensure changes are securely implemented

What You'll Do

Build the agentic SOC

• Lead the design and build of an AI-driven SOC that monitors, triages, investigates, and responds with as little human toil as possible
• Treat every manual alert-handling step as a candidate for automation, and measure how much of the queue the system closes on its own
• Own detection engineering: detection-as-code, testing, tuning
• Make sure the automation is trustworthy: clear guardrails on what it can do unattended, audit trails for what it did, and a human escalation path when it isn't sure
• Work with the wider security team on incident response when something real happens, and feed what you learn back into the system

Harden against new adversary techniques

• Work with Threat Intelligence to turn new tactics, techniques, and procedures into concrete hardening work and detection coverage
• Prioritize infrastructure hardening across cloud, identity, and endpoints based on observed attacker behaviour rather than benchmarks alone

Harden Clio's products

• Work directly on the core security functionality of Clio's fleet of products, alongside the product engineering teams that own them
• Push security controls into the platform itself, so every product team gets them without having to rebuild them

Close the loop with the Red Team

• Partner with the Red Team to find vulnerabilities, fix them, and verify the fixes
• Run exercises to measure detection coverage against real attack paths, and close the gaps they expose

Detect and stop product abuse

• Build automated detection for abuse of Clio's products: account takeover, fraud, scripted misuse, and patterns we haven't named yet
• Automate the response as well as the detection, so confirmed abuse is contained without waiting for someone to notice
• Work closely with SecDev to build preventative code generation paths, agent.md guides, and create pre-commit hooks

Lead the team

• Hire, grow, and retain a team of engineers
• Set clear direction and priorities, and make the team's progress visible to security leadership and the wider company
• Help define how the team scales toward follow-the-sun coverage

What You Bring

• Strong software development skills. We want you to build the software and have a direct impact on it
• Experience leading engineers, as a people manager or a tech lead who has grown into the role
• Hands-on security experience: secure development, and finding and fixing vulnerabilities
• Comfort making decisions about automation and AI where the cost of being wrong is a locked out lawyer that can sue us for free, and designing systems that fail safely
• Clear communication with engineers, leadership, and partner teams

Bonus Points

• You started in the trenches (SOC analyst, incident responder) and moved into engineering. We know this path is rare, and we'd love to hear from you if it's yours!
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agentic systems in production
• Detection engineering experience with a SIEM, SOAR, or detection-as-code pipeline
• Experience with fraud, anti-abuse, or trust and safety systems
• Cloud security and infrastructure hardening experience (AWS, identity providers, endpoint tooling)
• A recognized security certification or equivalent track record such as CISSP, GIAC/GCIH, OSCP, CREST
• Experience running or planning a follow-the-sun or on-call security function

What you will find here:

Compensation is one of the main components of Clio’s Total Rewards Program. We have developed a series of programs and processes to ensure we are creating fair and competitive pay practices that form the foundation of our human and high-performing culture.

Some highlights of our Total Rewards program include: 

• Competitive, equitable salary

• Clio offers a flexible hybrid work environment

• 25 days holiday + bank holidays

• Private Healthcare with Life Insurance & Critical Illness cover

• Pension contribution

• Professional development and growth options

• Clioversary recognition program with special acknowledgement at 3, 5, 7, and 10 years

The expected salary range for this role is £104,000 to £156,000 GBP. Initial placement within the range is informed by geographic region, experience, and skillset, with room to progress as impact and tenure grow. Final offer amounts will vary based on candidate profile.

Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity (DIBE) & Accessibility 

Our team shows up as their authentic selves, and are united by our mission. We are dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion. We pride ourselves in building and fostering an environment where our teams feel included, valued, and enabled to do the best work of their careers, wherever they choose to log in from. We believe that different perspectives, skills, backgrounds, and experiences result in higher-performing teams and better innovation. We are committed to equal employment and we encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

Clio provides accessibility accommodations during the recruitment process. Should you require any accommodation, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

Learn more about our culture at clio.com/careers

We're a Human and High Performing AI company, meaning we use artificial intelligence to improve all of our operations. In recruitment, AI helps us streamline the process for greater efficiency. However, we've built our systems to ensure that a human always reviews AI-generated output, and we never make automated hiring decisions.

Disclaimer: We only communicate with candidates through official @clio.com email addresses.