Director of Security Engineering

What you will do

You'll own security engineering across four pillars — product security, production security, offensive security, and assurance engineering — and you'll build two programs from nothing: agentic continuous pentesting integrated with specialized human testing, and a security champions program covering both classical and AI security.

This role is Sysdig's customer zero, and we mean that operationally rather than rhetorically. You'll run our security program on our own technology, starting with the headless expression of Sysdig Secure and the products we're building to protect AI workloads. You'll sit with the product team on roadmap direction, with as much influence as you're willing to take.

The Office of the CISO operates transparently, and we want our security team publishing and speaking, so the work you do here becomes work the industry can use — with a real production environment to cite and a product you helped design as the evidence.

What you will bring with you

• Have 8+ years in security or software engineering, including 4+ years leading and developing engineers, with real ownership of a team's roadmap, outcomes, and budget
• Have genuine depth in at least two of the four pillars, with working knowledge of all four — we'd rather have real expertise in product and offensive security than a survey of everything
• Have shipped security as code: Terraform or OpenTofu, controls enforced in pipelines, cloud and Kubernetes security at the architectural level rather than the dashboard level
• Have run detection and response for real, as the person on the escalation path rather than above it
• Are already building with agentic tooling and have opinions about where it fails
• Would rather make the secure path the easiest path than enforce it through policy — most of the impact here comes through partnership with Engineering and Product, not mandate
• Are credible with a customer's CISO and with your own engineers, without changing register much between them
• Are energized rather than unsettled by problems where established principles don't fully apply

What we look for

• Built a security function that didn't exist before, at a company where much of it was theirs to define
• Experience with capable adversaries — APT actors or other sophisticated cyberoffensive groups
• Built or run agent-driven offensive tooling, or automated vulnerability discovery and remediation at scale
• Worked on AI governance frameworks — ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF — as an engineering problem rather than a documentation exercise
• A track record of conference speaking, published research, or open-source contribution

When you join Sysdig, you can expect