Engineering Head - Cyber Security

Role : Head of Engineering

Company : A global cybersecurity scale-up focused on cyber threat intelligence, external attack-surface management, and dark-web monitoring. Backed by top-tier investors.

Location : Bengaluru, India

Experience : 20+ years

Function : Engineering & Technology Leadership

Industry : Cybersecurity (mandatory)

Travel : Occasional travel to international hubs, customer meetings, and industry events.

About the role :

We're hiring a senior engineering leader to own technology strategy, product engineering, platform reliability, and the engineering organisation. You will set the technical direction for a cybersecurity platform that ingests, analyses, and acts on massive volumes of threat-intelligence data - spanning the surface web, deep web, dark web, and underground sources - and that increasingly uses AI/ML to detect and automate response to adversary behaviour.

You will work directly with the CEO, COO, Chief Product Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, and the GTM leadership team.

What success looks like in 12 months :

- Engineering roadmap published, costed, and tracked quarterly against business OKRs.

- Engineering organisation restructured for scale : clear managers of managers, succession plans in place for top-three engineering leaders.

- Measurable improvement in release velocity, platform SLO adherence, and defect-escape rate.

- AI/ML capabilities materially embedded in at least two product lines, with a credible roadmap for the rest.

- Cross-functional cadence with Product, Security, Sales, and Customer Success running on a predictable rhythm - no last-minute surprises in board materials.

Key responsibilities

1. Engineering strategy & leadership :

- Define and execute the engineering strategy in alignment with the company's business and product goals.

- Lead, mentor, and develop a globally distributed organisation of engineering leaders, managers, and senior individual contributors.

- Build a high-performance culture of accountability, innovation, and continuous improvement.

- Establish engineering standards, architecture principles, delivery processes, and succession plans.

2. Cybersecurity & technical depth :

- Provide technical leadership across the cybersecurity product suite, with particular depth in threat intelligence, dark-web/deep-web collection, risk scoring, and brand-protection use cases.

- Drive the adoption of AI and ML across detection, analyst workflow automation, and threat triage.

- Guide architecture decisions for secure, scalable, resilient, and highly available platforms operating at large data volumes.

- Stay current on adversary tradecraft, emerging technologies, and the competitive landscape.

3. Engineering operations & execution :

- Own end-to-end delivery : planning, execution, quality, reliability, and performance.

- Establish engineering KPIs - delivery predictability, defect-escape rate, platform SLOs, cost-to-serve - and operate against them.

- Improve release management, test automation, incident response, and developer productivity.

- Manage technical risk, platform cost, and vendor relationships.

4. Strategic planning & stakeholder management :

- Partner with the executive team to align technology priorities with GTM, product, and customer-success priorities.

- Translate business strategy into engineering roadmaps, resource plans, and execution milestones.

- Communicate progress, risks, trade-offs, and investment requirements clearly to the board and executive leadership.

- Represent engineering in high-stakes customer and partner conversations where credibility is required.

Required qualifications :

- 20+ years in software engineering or technology leadership, with meaningful time at the VP or senior-leadership level.

- Mandatory : prior experience in the cybersecurity industry - ideally at a cybersecurity product company or a comparable security-technology environment.

- Proven experience leading large or distributed engineering teams at scale.

- Demonstrated understanding of AI/ML in enterprise software or cybersecurity, and the judgement to decide where to apply it and where not to.

- Strong track record on engineering strategy, architecture, operational scaling, and organisational design.

- Excellent stakeholder-management, communication, and people-development skills.

Preferred qualifications :

- Prior senior-VP-level role at a cybersecurity product company.

- Experience building AI-powered security products or data-intensive platforms (threat-intel, SIEM, SOAR, EASM, DRPS, or comparable).

- Exposure to EDR, endpoint protection, or incident-response technologies is a plus, but not required.

- Experience operating in a Series B / Series C high-growth environment, from scale-up pains through institutional maturity.

- Credible network across the cybersecurity engineering community.

Ideal candidate profile :

A strategic yet technically credible leader. Comfortable in a board room, equally comfortable in an architecture review. Can coach senior engineering leaders, challenge weak assumptions, and make hard calls on platform direction without flinching. Treats security, reliability, and cost as first-class design constraints. Has opinions on AI-in-security without being carried away by the hype cycle.

Work arrangement :

- Primary location : Bengaluru, India.

- Hybrid arrangement - regular presence at the Bengaluru engineering hub.

- Occasional international travel for customer meetings, leadership offsites, and industry events.