Senior Director, Engineering – Proactive Offense

As Senior Director of Engineering for Proactive Offense, you'll set the engineering direction and build the organization that turns offensive security research and capabilities into dependable, customer-facing NodeZero products. You'll lead through engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors across multiple teams, balancing technical judgment with organization-wide strategy and execution.

Responsibilities

Lead and scale the Proactive Offense engineering organization across teams responsible for offensive capabilities, exploit development, and attack automation within NodeZero; Translate the organization's charter into a clear technical strategy, operating model, and sequenced roadmap; Build an effective leadership structure as the organization grows; hire, coach, and develop managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors; Establish goals and operating mechanisms that make progress, quality, capacity, dependencies, and risks visible across teams; Partner with technical leaders on architecture and design, and ensure systems can evolve as the product and portfolio expand; Partner with Product, Precision Defense, Platform, and customer-facing teams to prioritize work across offensive research, vulnerability exploitation, attack content, and automation; Shape a coherent portfolio roadmap with explicit scope, measurable outcomes, and well-managed cross-team dependencies; Drive capabilities from proof of concept to production, ensuring research becomes reliable, scalable, supportable product features; Ensure engineering investment advances customer outcomes while balancing technical quality, speed to market, operational needs, and responsible product behavior; Surface tradeoffs early, communicate decisions clearly, and protect teams from competing priorities; Improve execution across multiple teams with clear planning, decision-making, and delivery practices; Hold the organization accountable for product quality, reliability, and maintainability; Identify organizational and technical risks early and align owners on mitigation; Use customer feedback, product performance, and engineering signals to continuously improve delivery; Maintain enough technical depth to guide consequential decisions without becoming the day-to-day decision bottleneck; Mentor technical leaders in building modular, resilient systems; Collaborate across Engineering, Product, and go-to-market teams; Foster a culture of collaboration, creativity, learning, and engineering excellence; Travel up to 10% may be required

Requirements

Significant experience leading and scaling software engineering organizations delivering SaaS or cybersecurity products, including leading through managers and senior technical leaders; A track record of setting engineering strategy and delivering across multiple teams or product areas in a fast-moving environment; Strong technical judgment in software architecture and offensive security domains such as exploit development, vulnerability research, attack automation, or red teaming; Demonstrated success taking complex technical capabilities from concept through production launch and continued operation at scale; Experience with distributed systems, cloud software, automation, and large-scale SaaS platforms, with the ability to guide architecture and design decisions; A product-oriented mindset and sound judgment balancing technical excellence, customer impact, speed to market, and operational considerations; Experience hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing teams and leaders, and establishing clear accountability across an organization; Strong cross-functional partnership skills, including alignment with Product and stakeholders across Engineering and go-to-market teams; Excellent analytical, written, verbal, and storytelling skills; able to translate complex engineering concepts into clear direction and decisions; A high degree of initiative, ownership, and accountability; Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; Deep familiarity with offensive security techniques and practices, including vulnerability research, exploit development, attack automation, or red-team operations; Proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, Go, C++, or C#, with experience building or guiding the development of large-scale software systems; Strong understanding of platform design, system architecture, and automation pipelines, including CI/CD, containerization, infrastructure as code, and observability practices; Experience with cloud infrastructure and services such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, and with production SaaS or security platforms; Familiarity with network protocols, multiple operating systems (including Windows and Linux), and common enterprise technologies; Working knowledge of databases such as PostgreSQL, Neo4j, or similar, and data-flow design; Awareness of cybersecurity industry standards and trends, with the ability to connect technical direction to customer and product needs

Nice to have

Offensive security certifications such as OSCP, OSEP, OSED, or GPEN; Experience mentoring teams on offensive tradecraft or developing proprietary offensive tooling; Experience scaling an engineering organization through significant hiring, organizational change, or product growth; Experience building B2B SaaS or security products in a startup or growth-stage company

Benefits

Inclusive team; Growth opportunities; Innovative culture; Hybrid and remote work models depending on role and location, including Chicago office; Competitive salary, equity (stock options) and benefits; Health, vision and dental insurance for employee and family; Flexible vacation policy; Generous parental leave