Director of Security Engineering

Team: CISO Security & Compliance

Location: Flexible - USA

Commitment: Regular - Full Time

Workplace Type: remote

What you will do

• Own security engineering, end to end. You build security engineering for Sysdig across the full code-to-cloud lifecycle. This is a senior leadership role on the Trust & Security team, reporting to the CISO. You'll own the security-engineering roadmap, standards, and budget, and act as the final decision-maker on tooling and practices for the function.
• Build and grow the team. You'll lead a small, high-leverage team of senior and staff security engineers, setting their technical direction and growing the team through hiring and the development of senior talent.
• Set functional strategy. Partner with the CISO and senior leadership to set functional strategy, translate it into operational plans and policy, and cascade it across the function.
• Bring an AI-first mindset to security delivery. Use AI to deliver security capabilities that help engineering build better systems and write better code — this isn't a bolt-on initiative, it's how the function operates.
• Secure the AI frontier. Make AI-assisted and agent-driven development safe across the org, use AI agents to scale security work itself, and defend the AI agents and workloads we run in production as first-class attack surface — work where the problems aren't clearly defined and established principles don't fully apply.
• Be a true product partner. Go beyond feedback: bring thoughtful, hands-on guidance to the product roadmap, using new capabilities internally first, then helping mature both our core cloud defense platform and our new AI workload protection.
• Engage internally and externally on security matters. Align senior leadership internally on security direction and trade-offs, and represent security directly with major customers on matters of significance — reconciling diverse stakeholder views to drive outcomes as a key leader within Trust & Security.
• Turn compliance into assurance. We maintain ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and SOC 2 Type II — but that's the floor. Your aim is continuous assurance of controls that not only meet the needs of the auditor but, more importantly, protect the trust of the customer.
• Model how we lead. Champion Sysdig's values, Trust in the Team, Love our Customers, Dig Deeper, and act as a change catalyst who builds a culture of trust, ownership, and continuous improvement.

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

Extra days off to prioritize your well-being
401(k) Retirement Savings Plan with a 3% company match
Maternity and Parental Leave
Mental health support for you and your family through the Modern Health app
Full health benefits package for you and your family