Director, Security Research

The role

Lead Sysdig's Threat Research Team, owning both adversary research and detection engineering. Focus on AI security research, including threats to AI models and agents, and AI-driven research methods.

What you will do

• Lead the Threat Research Team end-to-end: research agenda, detection content roadmap, and budget
• Build standing capability against AI model and agent abuse, prompt-layer attacks, AI supply chain, and attacks on AI infrastructure
• Lead and develop a small team of researchers and engineers, hands-on
• Own detection content that ships to customers and the Falco community
• Run adversarial validation against shipped detections and drive findings to closure
• Own the detection platform, including toolchain, attack reproduction environments, and behavior-based detection
• Publish research and act as the public voice of the work, including conference talks and open-source contribution
• Partner with Marketing to turn research into content and campaigns
• Convert research into reusable demonstrations and briefings for Sales Engineering and Customer Success
• Partner with Product Engineering on future detection capability

Required qualifications

• 10+ years in security research, threat research, or detection engineering
• 4+ years leading and developing researchers, with ownership of an agenda, outcomes, and budget
• Original AI security research, shown through published work or shipped detections
• Hands-on: writes code, builds tooling, runs analysis
• Uses agents in research work
• Public body of work such as original discovery, CVEs, named campaigns, conference talks, or open-source tooling
• Experience owning detection content that shipped to real users
• Depth in Linux, container, Kubernetes, and cloud internals at the syscall and control-plane level
• Able to run a research agenda alongside a detection queue with customer deadlines
• Credible with customer CISOs and with own researchers

Nice to have

• Built a research capability from scratch at a company
• Experience with capable adversaries such as APT actors, including attribution tradecraft
• Open-source maintainer or substantial contributor on a security project
• Worked against MITRE ATLAS, OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, or NIST AI RMF as an engineering problem
• Research picked up by mainstream press, cited by CERTs, or adopted by defenders

Benefits

• Extra days off
• 401(k) with 3% company match
• Maternity and parental leave
• Mental health support through the Modern Health app
• Full health benefits package for you and your family

Before you apply

• Remote role; U.S. annual salary range applies

About the company

Sysdig secures cloud innovation and created Falco, the open standard for cloud threat detection. Its technology is trusted by over 60% of the Fortune 500.