About
About Cairn
Founded in 2020 by a team from the UK defence and open-source communities, on a single conviction.
01 Story
Cairn was built on the conviction that organisations holding the country's most sensitive data should never have to trade control for convenience.
We started with a handful of engineers and a firm opinion. Five years on we are around 10 people in Coventry and London, doing the same thing at greater scale — quietly.
Our founders came from the UK defence and open-source engineering communities, tired of watching critical British institutions hand their security posture — and their data — to opaque, foreign-controlled platforms.
Founded
2020
Headquarters
Coventry
People
~10
Ownership
Founder-led
02 Values
Sovereignty is a security property
Auditability over obscurity
Ownership over dependency
Quiet competence
The work speaks.
03 Leadership
Dr. Alastair Frayne
Founder & Chief Executive
Founded Cairn after watching critical programmes tie themselves to platforms they could not inspect or control. Owns the sovereignty thesis.
Priya Nair
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Open-source infrastructure engineer with two decades in large-scale operations and a long history of upstream contribution across the monitoring and automation ecosystem. Responsible for Cairn’s engineering standards and the “everything as code” discipline.
Callum Hendry
Head of Security Operations
Runs Cairn’s Wazuh-based SOC. Previously led a CSIRT in the financial sector. Believes a detection you cannot explain is a detection you cannot trust.
Eleanor Whitfield
Head of Advisory
Governance and assurance lead. Takes clients through NCSC CAF readiness, ISO 27001, and Cyber Essentials Plus — with advice that is buildable because the people giving it also run the systems.
04 Careers
Work with us
We hire disciplined engineers who would rather own a problem than resell one.