Cyber Effects Group Lead

Overview

Draper is an independent, nonprofit research and development company headquartered in Cambridge, MA. The 2,000+ employees of Draper tackle important national challenges with a promise of delivering successful and usable solutions in areas such as military defense, space exploration, and biomedical engineering.

Draper’s Cyber Effects Group is seeking a Group Leader to drive the design and development of cyber software tools and capabilities, perform static and dynamic analysis on diverse firmware and software, and provide mentoring and technical leadership for a multidisciplinary team.

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of 10–20 staff, including hiring, promotions, annual reviews, and career development.
• Conduct performance evaluations and maintain awareness of staffing requirements.
• Write job requisitions, review and disposition incoming resumes, and conduct interviews.
• Serve as Lead Subject Matter Expert in the group’s specialty area.
• Shape Draper’s technology offerings and open new business areas based on program and technical experience.
• Analyze Draper’s strategy, collaborate with management to build capability in key areas aligned with customer priorities.
• Address group member issues and maintain cognizance of group activities.

• Excellent communication, written and verbal skills.
• Ability to present technical material to various engineering levels and customers.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office applications.
• Strong supervisory experience with teams of 10–20.

Requires a degree in Engineering or related discipline.

7+ years of experience in the engineering design, development, and management of complex systems.

• Manage and grow a staff of approximately 15, including hiring, promotions, annual reviews, mentoring, and growth.
• Contribute to Draper’s cyber strategy, R&D, and business-winning opportunities.
• Plan, lead, and execute cyber programs with frequent client communication and hands-on development.
• Collaborate effectively with multidisciplinary program teams, leadership, and non‑technical personnel.
• Drive solutions to complex problems with limited direction and adapt to changing requirements.
• Identify program/system‑level technical risks and develop mitigation strategies.

• Build and use custom low‑level software tools within complex cyber effects pipelines.
• Build reverse engineering automation tools and analysis frameworks.
• Expertise in static and dynamic program analysis using tools such as Ghidra, IDA, Binary Ninja, Radare, Angr, GDB, winDBG, QEMU, AFL++, etc.
• Experience with anti‑reverse‑engineering techniques (obfuscation, diversification).
• Proven background in understanding and exploiting software vulnerabilities and applying secure coding practices.
• Proficiency in programming languages and build systems such as C, C++, Python, Go, Rust, and LLVM pass development.
• Experience building high‑quality code and enforcing coding standards.

Proficiency with core operating system workings (user mode, kernel mode, boot processes) in Windows, GNU/Linux, or RTOS contexts; leveraging computing architectures and assembly languages (x86, ARM, RISCV, etc.).

• Proven track record of leading tasks and projects, creating timelines, delegating tasks, and prioritizing goals to meet contractual obligations.
• Experience communicating project progress and goals to clients/sponsors.
• Adaptive to changes in project schedules/goals based on client/sponsor needs.
• Effective communication across diverse teams, presenting to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Experience participating in proposal writing and business‑winning efforts.

• Experience creating technical strategies at the organization level.
• Ability to generate technical goals aligned with client/sponsor needs.
• Experience seeing projects through from inception to delivery.
• Experience leveraging machine learning to automate cyber software tool development and program analysis (where appropriate).
• History of business‑winning and leading…