Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. OPSWAT is a global leader in IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure cybersecurity, delivering an end-to-end platform that protects complex networks. They are seeking a Director of Engineering for their MetaDefender Email Security product, responsible for leading engineering efforts, ensuring quality, and driving the development of AI-native engineering practices.
Responsibilities
- Lead as an AI-first effort: make AI agents a first-class part of how the team works — orchestrating agents to create specs, generate code and tests, verify results, and run reviews — while ensuring humans own and validate every line that ships. Treat automation and intelligence as the default, not the exception
- Stay hands-on: remain directly in the codebase — setting architecture patterns, writing and reviewing critical code, prototyping, and unblocking hard technical problems. You lead by doing, not only by delegating
- Own end-to-end delivery of the roadmap: take full ownership of delivering the product roadmap set by Product Management — turning the “what to ship” into the “how to build,” and owning execution sequencing, technical risk, quality, security, and release across every deployment form factor
- Set technical direction (the “how”): drive the architecture and technology choices that underpin a product serving high-assurance environments at scale. Hold a strong engineering point of view and be willing to defend it
- Build and lead a high-performance team: recruit, develop, and retain top engineers and their leads across Romania and Hungary; create clear career paths and norms for code quality and review; and build a culture where strong engineers want to stay and grow
- Drive performance-based management: set clear, measurable expectations and run a rigorous, fair performance culture — recognizing and accelerating top performers, raising the bar continuously, and addressing underperformance decisively by coaching where there is a path and upgrading or exiting the role where there is not
- Hold a security-first quality bar: champion code review with a security lens for both human-written and AI-generated code, catching injection risks, insecure defaults, missing validation, and privilege-escalation vectors in file-handling and authentication paths before they ship
- Raise engineering velocity: continuously improve how the team works — CI/CD pipelines, AI-assisted development workflows, incident response, and operational maturity — so the team ships faster and more reliably over time
- Codify AI-native practices for the portfolio: establish the playbooks, AI context files, coding harnesses, test frameworks, and review norms developed on this product so other OPSWAT product teams can adopt them
- Partner cross-functionally: work shoulder-to-shoulder with the VP, Products, plus Product Management, Design, and security leaders — turning the product roadmap (the what) into engineering execution (the how), committing to scope and timelines, and pushing back clearly when trade-offs require it
Skills
- Full agentic development experience (required): You have personally run a full agentic, AI-powered SDLC end-to-end — and have done so in B2B and high-security enterprise environments where compliance, data sensitivity, and assurance requirements are non-negotiable. You can show real work (PRs, commit history, shipped products, or a portfolio) where agentic workflows drove delivery — not slideware about AI
- A product launched via a full AI-powered SDLC: demonstrable experience taking a product from spec to release using an end-to-end AI-assisted lifecycle (spec generation, code/test generation, automated verification, AI-assisted review, and CI/CD), with you accountable for the outcome
- Proven engineering leadership: 8+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years leading engineering teams (including managing managers/leads) through complex product delivery at scale. You can point to the decisions you made and why
- Performance-based leadership: a track record of building high-performing teams through rigorous, fair performance management — promoting excellence, making timely talent decisions, and reducing or replacing low performers when needed
- Deep technical excellence: strong, current software engineering fundamentals — solid command of design patterns, SOLID principles, and modern architecture. You can evaluate AI-assisted code with the same rigor as human-authored code. AI tools amplify strong fundamentals; they do not replace them
- Scalable systems experience: a proven history building scalable, distributed solutions — including relational/document databases, cloud-native services, and modern CI/CD systems
- Quality and test discipline: a high bar for tested, maintainable code; you use AI to accelerate test scaffolding, then validate that coverage is real and meaningful
- Distributed-team leadership: demonstrated ability to lead and align engineers across countries and time zones, building trust, clarity, and accountability in a remote/hybrid, multi-country setup
- Talent magnet and clear communicator: you identify strong engineers, make a compelling case for why they should join, and create an environment where they do their best work — and you communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders without oversimplifying
- Security-conscious by default: operating in critical infrastructure markets means security is never an afterthought; you hold the team to a security-first bar on design, code review, and incident response
- Domain familiarity: understanding of email as a communication channel and the underlying technology and protocols. Appreciation of the different deployment methods for email security and their characteristics
- Cloud services familiarity: experience of integrating products with M365 and/or Google Workspace and their associated API ecosystems
- .NET / C# ecosystem: hands-on or managerial experience with .NET Core / C# — enough to evaluate architectural decisions, review PRs credibly, and hire well for the stack
- Cloud-native and containers: experience leading the design or operation of cloud-native SaaS platforms — Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS/Azure/GCP — including using AI agents to script infrastructure and deployment automation
- AI context-file authoring: experience writing AI context files (e.g., CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, or equivalent) that encode architecture decisions and forbidden patterns for consistent, safe AI output across a team
- AI in CI/CD pipelines: familiarity running AI agents inside pipelines — auto-fixing lint, generating missing tests, or running safe migrations as pipeline steps — not as experiments, but as how the team actually works
- International team experience: a track record of building and maintaining engineering culture and delivery quality across multiple countries and time zones
- Async and high-throughput systems: experience validating concurrency and thread-safety in high-throughput services
Benefits
- Work from anywhere — a worldwide, remote-friendly role with a preference for the UK, USA, or a location near an OPSWAT-operated country.
- Stable, growing international company with an exceptional customer base across 50+ countries.
- Attractive compensation with regular performance assessments and flexibility for the right candidate.
Company Overview
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