Director, Security Research

• Lead the Sysdig Threat Research Team, owning adversary research and detection engineering
• Set the research agenda, detection content roadmap, and budget; make final decisions on investigations and shipped work
• Build AI security research capabilities covering model and agent abuse, agentic tool misuse, prompt-layer attacks, the AI supply chain, and AI-serving infrastructure
• Translate research findings into tuned detections and blog posts
• Lead and develop a small team of researchers and engineers while remaining hands-on
• Own managed rulesets, cloud and identity detections, and detection quality
• Conduct adversarial validation of shipped rules and improve coverage and evasion resistance
• Own the detection platform, including toolchains, attack reproduction environments, behavior-based detection, and adversary-deception telemetry
• Publish original discoveries, named campaigns, CVEs, conference presentations, and open-source contributions
• Partner with Marketing on content and campaigns
• Build reusable attack demonstrations, threat briefings, and advisory content for Sales Engineering and Customer Success
• Partner with Product Engineering on future detection capabilities and attacker defeat analysis

Requirements

• 10+ years in security research, threat research, or detection engineering
• 4+ years leading and developing researchers, with real ownership of an agenda, its outcomes, and its budget
• Original AI security research with published work or shipped detections in adversarial ML, agentic and tool-abuse attack paths, prompt-layer attacks, model supply chain, or attacks on AI-serving infrastructure
• Ability to write code, build tooling, and run analysis hands-on
• Current use of agents to conduct research work, with opinions about their limitations
• Public body of work including original discovery, CVEs, named campaigns, conference talks, or open-source tooling used by others
• Ownership of detection content shipped to real users
• Depth in Linux, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud internals at the syscall and control-plane level
• Ability to manage an open-ended research agenda alongside a customer-deadline-driven detection queue
• Credibility with customers' CISOs and researchers
• Experience building a previously nonexistent research capability
• Experience with capable adversaries such as APT actors or sophisticated offensive cyber groups, including attribution tradecraft
• Open-source stewardship as a maintainer or substantial contributor on 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 an engineering problem
• Research recognized by mainstream press, CERTs, or defenders

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in leading security research initiatives, particularly in AI security, while managing a team and driving detection engineering outcomes. Proven ability to translate complex research into actionable detections and maintain credibility with stakeholders.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• 10+ Years In Security Research
• 4+ Years Leading Researchers
• Original AI Security Research
• Depth In Linux And Kubernetes
• Experience With AI Security Frameworks

Hard Skills

• Detection Engineering
• Adversarial Machine Learning
• Code Writing
• Tool Building
• Research Agenda Management
• Adversary Attribution
• Detection Quality Improvement
• Open-Source Contribution
• Cloud Internals
• Behavior-Based Detection

Soft Skills

• Team Leadership
• Communication With CISOs
• Collaboration With Marketing
• Customer Engagement

Industry Keywords

• Threat Research
• Adversarial Validation
• AI Security
• MITRE ATLAS
• OWASP Top 10
• NIST AI RMF
• APT Actors
• Cybersecurity

Tools & Technologies

• Sysdig
• Kubernetes
• Containers
• Cloud Platforms
• Detection Platforms
• AI-Serving Infrastructure
• Attack Reproduction Environments