VP Security

About

Swan is Europe’s embedded banking specialist. We empower software companies to embed banking features like accounts, cards, and payments directly into their products, under their own brand.Swan processes over €2.5 billion in monthly transactions for more than 150 companies—like Pennylane, Indy, Agicap, Libeo, and Lucca. Founded in 2019, the company has received growth capital from leading investors such as Lakestar, Accel, Creandum, Bpifrance and Eight Roads. Swan is a principal member of Mastercard and a licensed financial institution, regulated by the French banking authority (ACPR).

✨ Our mission

Banking belongs in business software

Many software companies already serve small businesses incredibly well: helping them send invoices, run payroll, manage inventory, and more. They’re on a mission to become the central hub for managing every aspect of business life.

But when it comes to financial workflows, there’s still a gap. Too many critical tasks like managing cash flow, tracking payments, or reconciling accounts happen outside the software, across spreadsheets, email threads, banking portals.

It’s a missed opportunity. Business software shouldn’t just record financial activity — it should run it.

To learn more about us: About Swan ; Career.

Job description

As VP Security, you'll lead the teams that protect Swan's banking platform, its customers' data and the tools every Swan employee uses daily. You'll ensure Swan stays secure, compliant and resilient. You'll report directly to the CTO.

We believe perfect security does not exist. Good leadership here means making explicit, informed, risk-based trade-offs and focusing resources where they have the greatest impact.

✨ Your mission

Leadership & Management

- Define and communicate security strategy & budget aligned with Swan's business objectives and risk appetite
- Lead, coach and develop a team of ~4 across Security Engineering & GRC growing their scope, judgment and influence in a high-trust environment with ownership

Steer cyber risk, compliance and trust

- Own the ICT risk management framework at the strategic level: risk register, assessments, treatment plans, exceptions, and escalation of risks that exceed Swan's risk appetite
- Drive audit and certification readiness (ISO 27001) and regulatory compliance (DORA, PSD2, GDPR, EU AI Act), including internal audits
- Make security understandable and actionable: explain risks, trade-offs and costs in clear business language to the Executive, Risk and Security Committees
- Represent Swan's security maturity and risk posture to regulators, auditors, banking partners, enterprise customers and insurers

Lead security operations and resilient technology

- Set expectations for security: threat intelligence, security monitoring, vulnerability management, penetration and threat-led testing, secure-by-design practices with SLAs and KPIs
- Foster a blameless postmortem culture and make sure lessons learned translate into lasting improvements
- Address emerging risks such as AI security, and support the fraud and anti-abuse teams on our payment flows

✨ Curious about your future team?

The team, 4 people, covers Security Engineering including security monitoring, incident response, risk and audit programmes, ISMS, identity, devices and SaaS tools.

Preferred experience

✨ You’re a great match if:

Security & Technical Leadership

- Extensive security experience: 10+ years in information security & security engineering
- Deep technical expertise: strong understanding of cloud security, identity and access management, network and application security, and security tooling
- Governance, risk & compliance: hands-on knowledge of ISO 27001, DORA and GDPR

Leadership & Management

- Strategic thinking: turns business goals and risk appetite into a focused roadmap, balancing security, speed, cost and user experience
- Stakeholder management: strong executive presence; comfortable with board-level committees, regulators and auditors
- Clear communicator who explains risk simply, builds a blameless security culture, and collaborates effectively across teams

Operational & Business Acumen

- Risk-driven: uses risk quantification and data to prioritise work and demonstrate the value of security investments
- Business orientation: sees security and compliance as a commercial asset that wins partners and opens markets

Nice to have

- Certification such as CISSP, CISM, CISA, CRISC or CCSP
- AI Security posture with ISO 42001, the EU AI Act and broad AI security topics
- Experience in a regulated or critical environment: banking, insurance, payments, sensitive SaaS (PSD2, PCI DSS, ACPR)

It’s okay if you don’t tick all the boxes, don’t let imposter syndrome prevent you from applying! 🙌

Swan is committed to providing a caring work environment for all employees, regardless of age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, or belief.

When it comes to recruitment, we’re interested in your work experience, skills, and overall personality. Because diversity makes the workplace stronger and is necessary for Swan’s success, we are intensifying efforts to incorporate concrete actions to help us improve in this area.

About Swan

✨ Perks of being a Swanee:

- Meal Vouchers: We provide a meal voucher card to cover your meals on work days.
- Holidays : 25 days + RTT 🏝️
- Transport: Monthly mobility package for employees. In accordance with the company agreement for sustainable mobilities, you can now use your mobility package to pay for alternative commuting modes. 🚇
- Health insurance (mutuelle) : Alan . This is Swan's health and welfare insurance. 🚑
- Sports : Thanks to our partnership with Classpass , you can enjoy advantageous discounts on subscriptions. They offer a wide range of sports activities as well as wellness activities. The offers are valid in several European cities, as well as online. 🏋
- Well-being support: access to Moka Care for mental health and wellness. 🧘
- Hybrid remote policy : We offer the possibility of working from home for 2 days per week. 🏡
- Offsite : Once a year we gather to reconnect, deep-dive into big topics, and relax. 🤝
- This isn’t a perk, it should be the rule, but diversity and inclusion are important at Swan. We’re working hard to get better every day.

✨ Our values:

Swan’s core values guide our actions daily. Individually, they may seem obvious, but together, they form a unique culture.

Simplicity: Leonardo Da Vinci said: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If something's convoluted or confusing, we work extra hard to break it down. - Making complex things simple is what we do.

Long Term : We always play the long game, whether it's to support our partners in their growth journey, or make tangible commitments to climate action.

Excellence : We are a team of experts who consistently go all out to create pixel-perfect banking services and exceed our partners' expectations— whatever it takes.

Be Human : We believe in the power of kindness and the importance of acting with integrity. But embracing our humanity extends beyond interpersonal interactions, it means caring about greater issues that affect our planet.

You can find out more about our culture .

Recruitment process

- A 45-min call with Baptiste Faure , Talent Acquisition Manager
- A 60-min interview with Florent Poissonnet , CTO
- A case study to prepare at home and to present with Florent Poissonnet and Matthieu Piraud , CRO
- A 60-min interview with Anne Le Bruchec , Chief People Officer
- A 45-min Peer Interview with Adrien Di Mascio , VP Engineering and Ross Manthrope , Platform Director
- A 60-min interview with Camille Tyan , CEO