Director of Engineering, Email Security

Our client is a global leader in IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure cybersecurity and delivers an end-to-end platform that gives public and private sector organizations and enterprises the advantages needed to protect their networks, secure their devices, and ensure compliance. Their commitment to innovative technology has earned the trust of organizations, governments, and institutions globally,
Our client is assembling a small founding team to build something genuinely hard: high-throughput services that inspect live traffic, terminate and analyze TLS in the data path, and hold near-zero latency while doing it. This is real systems engineering — streaming, distributed, latency-obsessed — not another CRUD app behind a form.

The products are part of our client’s email threat prevention portfolio, trusted by governments and critical infrastructure operators to stop file-borne and email-borne threats before they reach the inbox. It comprises two complementary products designed for different environments and customer profiles. It is deployed on-premises in front of existing mail servers, and embeds threat prevention technology.
This role owns the engineering for the products across both deployment models — the on-premises gateway and the cloud-native Microsoft 365 service — each with its own security, assurance, and operational demands, and all built to scale.

We are looking for a Director of Engineering who leads from the front. This is a hands-on, technically-centric leadership role — not a pure people-management position — with full accountability for the engineering of the email security: architecture, delivery, quality, and the teams that build it. You will lead engineering across multiple deployment form factors — from air-gapped high security environments to native-cloud deployments — operating with the rigor of a principal engineer and the clarity of an executive.
You are an AI-native engineering leader. You have personally orchestrated fleets of AI agents to architect, build, test, and ship production systems, and you have launched and released real products through a full AI-powered software development lifecycle (SDLC) — from specification and code generation to automated testing, review, and deployment. Product Management defines what to ship; you define how to build it.

You own the end-to-end delivery of the roadmap Product Management sets, hold the delivery bar, and build a high-performance culture the rest of the engineering portfolio will look to as a model for AI-native development. You report to the VP, Products and lead a distributed team across Romania and Hungary, while the role itself can be based anywhere — with a preference for the UK, USA.

• 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 d a strong engineering…