Director of safety and security

Around the world, courageous people and communities are fighting to turn the tide of authoritarianism, environmental destruction, and social injustice. But they face attacks, harassment, and censorship from powerful vested interests.

This is where you come in.

You will be leading an international team of consultants providing security mentoring and capacity building to organisations and activists under threat in violent environments and closed civic spaces. You will be liaising with international foundations and high-profile nonprofits in the human rights, environmental, and humanitarian worlds. And you will be central to the organisational culture and strategic planning needed to grow our organisation in a sustainable manner.

Role description

As our director of safety and security, you will:

1. Continuously develop and promote our safety and security services.

2. Complete security risk management and duty of care audits and produce bespoke security risk management frameworks and other higher-level products (approximately 20% of time).

3. Respond to enquiries from clients and liaise with them and our consultant team through any subsequent contracts.

4. Process and manage our responses to requests and referrals for funded support for at-risk activists and low-resource civil society organisations.

5. Manage an international and multilingual team of 11 consultants and trainers providing safety and security support to clients and recipients, including:

   Quality assure and provide expert technical input into the work of your colleagues in the safety and security team.

   Review and approve consultant invoices and timesheets, update our project management system, and conduct annual reviews with team members.

   Maintain an effective team and recruit and onboard new consultants as required to fill gaps or meet demand.

6. Be responsible for our internal security risk management:

   Provide travel security support to our team members, ensure that our travel management procedure is understood and followed, and coordinate any check-ins and loss-of-contact procedures during travel.

   Review and revise our crisis management procedure, constitute and coordinate the crisis management team, and capacity build where required.

   Coordinate our response to any security incident or crises involving our team members.

   Continuously improve and socialise our security risk management framework.

7. Play an active role in shaping our organisational strategy and culture as part of our senior management team alongside our CEO, finance director, wellbeing and resilience lead, and digital security lead.

Person specification

Essential

• You will have at least five years’ professional experience in security risk management or protection roles in the non-profit sector.
• You will have at least three years’ professional experience in international programme management roles.
• You will have consultancy experience or experience delivering projects for internal and external clients.
• You will be able to translate risk management principles and technical knowledge into the human rights sector.
• You will understand how security risk management interacts with enterprise risk management in the non-profit sector.
• You will have excellent technical knowledge and experience, and be confident in conducting security risk assessments and security management audits and creating security risk management frameworks.
• You will have lived and worked in violent, austere, and remote environments.
• You will be sensitive to the progressive and rights-based agendas and diverse profiles of our clients and recipients.
• You will be an excellent people manager with the ability to build, motivate, and mentor distributed consultant teams.
• You will have experience managing and working with senior external stakeholders.
• You will have excellent project and budget management skills.
• You will have excellent written and spoken English, and be able to clearly communicate with and build understanding among colleagues and clients.

Desirable

• You may have an understanding of the digital security and wellbeing aspects of holistic security.
• You may have experience working in a senior management team or board.
• You may have a risk management or project management qualification.
• You may have excellent written and spoken French or Spanish.

Remuneration

You will receive £65,000 per annum salary. You will also receive generous employer pension contributions, annual leave, and occupational sick pay, plus a package of psychosocial support and health and wellbeing resources, including private health insurance. Flexitime is standard practice in Open Briefing. The exact benefits package will depend on your location and local employment laws.

This is a full-time staff role for an initial 12 months, renewable by mutual agreement and dependent on funding and performance. Consultancy/contractor options might be possible as an alternative for the right candidate. Note, we always seek long-term working relationships over several years with our team members, so this position would not suit someone looking for a short-term contract.

Location

You can be based anywhere in a time zone that is UTC +/- 4 hours. If based outside the United Kingdom, you need to be in a country on this list of locations where we can use an Employer of Record (EOR) to ensure that we meet our obligations under local employment law. Wherever you are located, you must be able to accommodate pre-booked calls with colleagues and clients across the world, including outside usual office hours.

Full details are available at https://www.openbriefing.org/blog/were-hiring-could-you-be-our-new-director-of-safety-and-security/.