Head of IT & Security
About Motorway
Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace – our award winning, online-only platform connects private car sellers with over 7,500 verified dealers nationwide, who compete to offer the best price. Founded in 2017, our technology makes the process refreshingly easy, earning us an 'Excellent' Trustpilot rating with over 70,000 reviews. We're not just building a platform; we're changing how people sell cars.
Backed by leading investors like Index Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, and following a successful $190 million funding round, we're on a mission to transform the used car market.
About the job
As Head of IT & Security, you are accountable for how Motorway manages technology risk, cyber security, and operational IT as the business scales. This is not a compliance-first or tool-driven role. It is a senior leadership role focused on reducing real business risk while enabling speed, productivity, and profitability.
You will own Motorway’s security posture end-to-end, spanning software and cloud risk, monitoring, and incident response, while also leading the core IT capabilities that underpin how teams work every day. This includes identity and access, internal platforms, service tooling, and the reliability of systems and tooling that support customer operations (across seller and dealer teams) and corporate functions.
You will work closely with Engineering, Product, Legal, Finance, People, and the executive team to make clear, proportionate decisions about risk, reliability, and investment, ensuring security and IT scale in step with the business. This role exists because Motorway is growing quickly, and security and operational IT must evolve without slowing the business down.
The Head of IT & Security reports directly to the Chief Operating Officer, James Wilson, reflecting the importance of security and IT as core business enablers at Motorway. The role will be based in London, with travel once weekly to our Brighton office.
Responsibilities
This role is responsible for reducing technology and security risk while keeping Motorway fast, productive, and scalable. You will lead through influence, make explicit trade-offs, and ensure security and IT decisions are grounded in real business impact.
Security, Risk & Resilience
Own Motorway’s security strategy and execution, acting as the accountable owner for cyber, fraud, and data risk
Clearly articulate risk, impact, and trade-offs to senior leadership, prioritising effort where it materially reduces business impact
Operate a unified incident response and resilience model, ensuring fast triage, clear ownership, effective communication, and continuous improvement through post-incident learning
Secure Engineering & Software Risk
Partner closely with Engineering to embed security into development workflows
Drive adoption of security tooling and patterns within pipelines, infrastructure templates, and application standards
Ensure software and API security risks are understood, prioritised, and addressed in proportion to risk
Monitoring, Detection & Response
Own security monitoring and detection across cloud, applications, and identity, with a focus on signal quality and measurable outcomes
Use automation and AI-assisted approaches to scale visibility, reporting, and response without scaling headcount
IT & Platform Foundations
Lead core IT and platform capabilities that underpin secure access, identity, endpoints, and employee productivity
Ensure controls are reliable, proportionate, and support secure defaults while maintaining a strong employee experience
IT Service Delivery & Support
Own the reliability and effectiveness of IT service delivery, including end-user support, incident handling, and request fulfilment
Ensure IT support is responsive, well-prioritised, and aligned to business impact
Ensure clear ownership, escalation paths, and service standards so issues are resolved quickly without unnecessary process
Continuously improve IT operations and tooling to reduce friction for teams as Motorway scales
Operational tooling & business systems
Work closely with operational teams to improve tooling and workflows
Ensure systems are well integrated, appropriately controlled, and resilient as the business scales
Set clear expectations for access, data handling, and vendor assurance across operational systems
Leadership & collaboration
Lead and develop a high-impact IT & Security team, setting clear priorities
Build strong working relationships with Engineering, Product, Legal, Finance, and People to align security decisions with business goals
Manage key security, IT, and operational tooling vendors, ensuring value is extracted from existing investments and risks are well understood
Own and manage the IT & Security budget, making explicit trade-offs and maximising return on spend
Requirements
This role requires a senior leader who combines strong security and IT judgement with exceptional communication and influence. You should be comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment, making pragmatic decisions, and aligning diverse stakeholders around clear priorities and outcomes.
Strategy: Ability to set and communicate a clear security and IT strategy aligned to business goals, translating risk, growth plans, and constraints into a prioritised roadmap over multiple horizons
Leadership: Proven experience leading security and/or IT functions in a high-growth, technology-driven environment
Judgement: A pragmatic, outcome-driven mindset with a strong sense of ownership and high business judgement
Decision-making: Experience leading security and technology in a scaling, product-led environment, making clear risk-based trade-offs between speed, impact, and investment
Expertise: Strong understanding of modern security challenges across cloud platforms, software and API security, identity, monitoring, and incident response
Composure: Comfortable leading through incidents and ambiguity, with the judgement to act decisively when risk is high
Influence: Able to influence engineering teams and senior stakeholders, driving decisions and trade-offs through trust, credibility, and shared outcomes rather than authority
Communication: Exceptional communicator who can translate complex technical risk into clear, relevant decisions for executives, engineers, and non-technical teams, adapting depth and language to the audience