Director, Security Research

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Lead the Sysdig Threat Research Team, responsible for adversary research and detection engineering.

• Establish the research agenda, detection content roadmap, and budget; finalize decisions regarding investigations and delivered work.

• Develop AI security research capabilities that encompass model and agent misuse, agentic tool exploitation, prompt-layer attacks, the AI supply chain, and AI-serving infrastructure.

• Convert research findings into precise detections and engaging blog posts.

• Guide and nurture a small team of researchers and engineers while maintaining a hands-on approach.

• Oversee managed rulesets, cloud and identity detections, and ensure detection quality.

• Perform adversarial validation of deployed rules to enhance coverage and resistance to evasion.

• Manage the detection platform, which includes toolchains, attack reproduction environments, behavior-based detection, and adversary-deception telemetry.

• Publish original findings, named campaigns, CVEs, conference presentations, and contributions to open-source projects.

• Collaborate with Marketing on content creation and promotional campaigns.

• Create reusable attack demonstrations, threat briefings, and advisory content for Sales Engineering and Customer Success teams.

• Work alongside Product Engineering on upcoming detection capabilities and analysis of attacker defeat strategies.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in security research, threat research, or detection engineering.

• More than 4 years of experience leading and developing research teams, with genuine ownership of an agenda, its results, and its budget.

• Proven record of original AI security research with published work or implemented detections in adversarial ML, agentic and tool-abuse attack paths, prompt-layer attacks, model supply chains, or attacks on AI-serving infrastructure.

• Proficiency in coding, building tools, and conducting hands-on analysis.

• Current application of agents for research purposes, along with insights into their limitations.

• Established public body of work that includes original discoveries, CVEs, named campaigns, conference presentations, or open-source tools utilized by others.

• Demonstrated ownership of detection content distributed to actual users.

• Extensive knowledge of Linux, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud internals at both the syscall and control-plane levels.

• Capacity to manage an open-ended research agenda while handling a customer-deadline-driven detection queue.

• Credibility with customers’ CISOs and researchers.

• Experience in building a research capability that previously did not exist.

• Familiarity with capable adversaries such as APT actors or advanced offensive cyber groups, including attribution tradecraft.

• Active involvement in open-source stewardship as a maintainer or significant contributor to a security project with dependent users.

• Experience with AI security frameworks such as MITRE ATLAS, OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, or NIST AI RMF as engineering challenges.

• Research recognized by mainstream media, CERTs, or cybersecurity defenders.

🏝️ Benefits

• Additional days off to focus on 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 via the Modern Health app.

• Comprehensive health benefits package for you and your family.