Head of Reliability Trust & Security

About the Role

Echelon is seeking a Head of Reliability Trust & Security to join their team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This full-time role is critical for establishing and maintaining trust, reliability, and security across the organization's operations and customer engagements. The successful candidate will build an organization where security, reliability, and compliance are foundational principles, owning Echelon’s environment and defining the standards for all internal and external builders.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own a multi-year strategy and roadmap for infrastructure, security, resilience, and trust, aligning with business goals and reporting risk posture to the executive team and board.
• Lead a security program based on zero-trust principles, covering cloud, application, identity, data, and endpoint security across corporate environments and products.
• Embed security into the software lifecycle, including shift-left practices, secure by default principles, and supply-chain security.
• Manage threat detection, incident response, and vulnerability management, including security for AI and LLM-powered features and AI data governance.
• Define and verify availability, recovery, and observability standards for engineers and partners.
• Own disaster recovery and business continuity plans, conducting regular tested exercises and leading responses to major incidents.
• Achieve and maintain necessary certifications and regulatory compliance, including NCA ECC-2:2024, PDPL, NDMO residency, and ISO 27001.
• Conduct audits, customer security reviews, manage a public trust center, and oversee the responsible disclosure process.
• Own enterprise risk management, including the risk framework, risk register, and risk appetite, with regular reporting to leadership.
• Manage third-party and vendor risk, partnering with Legal on privacy and data protection.

Areas of Ownership

• Environment Ownership: Managing Echelon’s cloud accounts, identity, keys, and source code, ensuring all builders operate under Echelon’s access controls.
• Security: Overseeing security engineering, application and cloud security, identity and access, detection and response, and vulnerability management.
• Resilience & Reliability: Managing incident management, disaster recovery, and business continuity, defining and verifying availability, recovery, and observability standards.
• Trust & Compliance: Ensuring governance, security, and privacy compliance with Saudi regulatory standards (PDPL, NCA ECC-2:2024, NDMO) and GDPR as a global baseline, including audit readiness and enterprise risk management.
• Data & Secure Channels: Managing classification, segregation, encryption, and retention of Echelon’s and customer data, and secure communication channels.
• Regulator & Customer Liaison: Acting as the primary contact for NCA and SDAIA/NDMO, handling security questionnaires and contractual security clauses.

Qualifications and Experience

• Over 10 years of relevant experience in reliability, trust, and security leadership roles.
• Demonstrated ability to define and implement multi-year strategies and roadmaps.
• Experience with Saudi regulatory standards (PDPL, NCA ECC-2:2024, NDMO) and international standards like GDPR and ISO 27001.
• Proficiency in leading security programs based on zero-trust principles.
• Experience with AI and LLM-powered features, including AI data governance and KSA residency for AI processing.

Work Environment and Reporting

This position is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and involves travel to customer sites across the Kingdom. The Head of Reliability Trust & Security reports directly to the Managing Director and works closely with the Chief Operating Officer. The role includes participation in the Crisis Management Team, leading the technical and data-protection workstream during incidents.

Working Principles

Candidates should approach challenges by focusing on the problem rather than the tool, demonstrating curiosity, speed, rigor, confidence, humility, autonomy, and resourcefulness. The role requires situational leadership and the ability to act as a force multiplier within the team. An AI-native depth is essential, including understanding how AI systems fail and are attacked.