Software Engineering Manager

Rapid7’s Metasploit team develops and delivers the world’s best-known software exploitation framework, working with the open-source community to help organizations around the world test their defenses and expose cybersecurity risk. We’re looking for a software engineering manager with strong team leadership experience and an interest in security to head up Metasploit’s commercial engineering team, enhancing and maintaining Rapid7’s offensive security product offering for thousands of global customers. 

About the Team

Metasploit is the world’s best-known hacker toolkit. At Rapid7, a distributed team of security researchers and software engineers works with the community to incorporate fresh features, enhancements, and fixes into Metasploit. The Metasploit Pro team works with both the open-source community and with Rapid7 customers to solve modern security testing challenges, translating the latest attack techniques and workflows into easy-to-use product features that help organizations identify and remediate risk. 

Metasploit and its related projects are built with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but Metasploit also incorporates and targets many other languages and tech stacks. Metasploit engineering team operations include heavy use of pair programming.

About the Role

As a software engineering manager, you’ll mentor and grow more junior developers in addition to writing code yourself. We’re looking for a skilled, collaborative manager to operate as a player/coach, directly contributing to sprint goals on a day-to-day basis and bringing strong engineering principles to bear on projects from architecture through implementation. You’ll also have the opportunity to own and drive offensive security engineering strategy for Rapid7 alongside several other tenured technical leaders who happen to be some of the best hacker-developers in the business. 

In this role, you will:

• Act as an anchor and founding member of Rapid7’s Prague-based offensive security engineering team, helping Rapid7 leadership develop and execute hiring strategy for the R+D arm of the company. You’ll help lead hiring and onboarding efforts for new offensive security engineers and other Prague- and Belfast-based engineering teams, providing input on local talent and team fit.

• Mentor and manage a high-performing team — you’ll offer feedback and career guidance, set team and individual goals, pair frequently with junior engineers on technical tasks, and ensure team direction is in line with Rapid7 business priorities. 

• Work with Metasploit engineers in North America, Belfast, and Prague on day-to-day product development, teaming with our open-source engineering group to drive consistency and operational stability across the whole product pipeline. 

• Partner with our product manager and principal engineers to prioritize work, plan sprints, and ensure customer commitments are met, providing strong technical leadership and incorporating business context in decision making and execution.

• Guide teams in implementing and improving automated testing across a wide range of scenarios.

• Contribute and plan enhancements for Metasploit’s roadmap based on your understanding of customer needs and offensive security techniques.

• Drive an engineering culture of transparency, continuous learning, and operational excellence for the offensive security ecosystem at Rapid7.

The skills you’ll bring include:

• Experience as a technical team lead or manager in one or more engineering-related domains (e.g., software development, product security engineering, application security or development)

• Ability to learn and evaluate new technologies quickly, digging into code to find answers. You’re comfortable with experimentation and uncertainty; not everything is spelled out, but everything is discoverable!

• Familiarity with (or interest in) Metasploit and offensive security. Ideally, you have some understanding of security testing challenges and workflows, know one or two of the key offerings  in the offensive security tool space, and know how red and blue teams leverage tools like Metasploit in different business settings. 

• Strong record of mentoring, pairing with, and developing junior engineers in an agile environment, leading with empathy and emphasizing the user’s experience.

• Experience with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and/or JavaScript is a major bonus. Ruby doesn’t need to be your primary language, but it helps to be able to understand and extend the techniques that Metasploit embodies. 

• Understanding of modern languages (e.g., Python, Ruby, Go), interprocess communication, and modern networking and deployment tooling (e.g., Kubernetes, AWS, Vagrant, Docker)

• Experience analyzing business, customer, and other data to make engineering and product decisions

We know that the best ideas and solutions come from multi-dimensional teams. That’s because these teams reflect a variety of backgrounds and professional experiences. If you are excited about this role and feel your experience can make an impact, please don’t be shy — apply today.

About Rapid7

Rapid7 is creating a more secure digital future for all by helping organizations strengthen their security programs in the face of accelerating digital transformation. Our portfolio of best-in-class solutions empowers security professionals to manage risk and eliminate threats across the entire threat landscape from apps to the cloud to traditional infrastructure to the dark web. We foster open source communities and cutting-edge research–using these insights to optimize our products and arm the global security community with the latest in attackers methods. Trusted by more than 10,000 customers worldwide, our industry-leading solutions and services help businesses stay ahead of attackers, ahead of the competition, and future-ready for what’s next.​