Vice President of Engineering, Stairwell
Threat detection & cybersecurity platform
Be an early applicant
Threat detection & cybersecurity platform
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
21-100 employees
Company mission
Stairwell's mission is to arm businesses with the tools and confidence to protect their organization.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ in senior leadership roles (VP, Director, or similar)
- Proven track record building and scaling complex distributed systems - including architecture, execution, and operations
- Experience leading cross-functional teams across backend, platform, and infrastructure - with a strong bias for shipping
- Deep familiarity with cloud-native systems (ideally GCP), Go, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
- Experience integrating AI/ML into product features or infrastructure — ideally in applied contexts like detection logic, enrichment, anomaly analysis, or automation workflows
- Strong grasp of how to apply AI tools to modern software development — from internal copilots to code quality checks, testing, and build acceleration
- Demonstrated ability to set and enforce high standards across hiring, code quality, technical design, and delivery
- Strong communication and planning skills - with a willingness to roll up your sleeves when needed
Desirable
- Background in security infrastructure, malware analysis, threat detection, or high-scale telemetry systems
- Experience with large-scale data pipelines, ETL, or continuous scanning infrastructure
- Familiarity with detection logic (YARA, Sigma), binary analysis, or reverse engineering workflows
- Track record of building customer-facing APIs or developer platforms with high adoption and integration complexity
- Comfortable balancing short-term wins with long-term architectural decisions - and communicating those tradeoffs clearly
What the job involves
- We’re building the most advanced system for malware discovery and analysis on the planet - not as a nice-to-have feature, but as a new foundation for security. We process trillions of DNS resolutions. Analyze billions of files continuously. Preserve every artifact, forever, and re-analyze them constantly with detection logic and intelligence that gets smarter by the hour
- Our architecture is complex. Our mission is clear. We need a VP of Engineering who can lead both
- This is a role for someone who can operate technically at depth - designing the next phase of a distributed system that processes and analyzes petabytes of data every day - while also building the org, practices, and culture that make execution consistent and scalable. Not just shipping fast, but shipping sustainably. Not just building systems - building a team that can evolve them for years
- Product & Platform Execution:
- Drive execution across core platform, infrastructure, detection pipelines, artifact ingestion, and customer integrations
- Translate product direction and threat research into system architecture, engineering plans, and shipped software
- Balance speed with quality. Prioritize ruthlessly. Deliver predictably
- Org Design & Leadership:
- Build a high-performance engineering org - sharp, low-ego engineers who care about the work and the mission
- Hire experienced, accountable engineers who thrive with autonomy. Set high standards early, make expectations explicit, and raise the bar as the company grows
- Create a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous improvement - where everyone knows what good looks like
- Collaboration & Strategic Impact:
- Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the CTO to align technical vision with product and company strategy
- Partner with Threat Research to turn detection insights into capabilities
- Partner with Sales Engineering and Customer Success to ensure we’re building solutions that matter in the field
- Represent engineering in executive discussions. Drive alignment across teams
- Technical Leadership:
- Define and evolve the system architecture to support petabyte-scale data, real-time analysis, and continuous reprocessing of historical artifacts
- Champion engineering quality: secure-by-default design, strong review culture, automated testing, and reliable releases
Our take
Cybersecurity threat is one of the largest challenges businesses today face, tackled by a variety of threat recognition and detection software platforms. However, cyber threats are time-sensitive, and whilst software solutions can analyze evidence to identify and prevent a threat, the time-consuming nature of evidence-gathering workflows can mean solutions arrive too late.
Stairwell provides a threat detection and cybersecurity platform that focuses on treating all files as suspicious, pre-preserving all information within a cybersecurity environment as evidence to provide a comprehensive history of cybersecurity health. This platform uses this data to reveal past intrusions, provide an all-in-one cybersecurity dashboard, personalize security stacks, and rapidly reduce threat detection time.
Whilst the company faces significant competition within the saturated cybersecurity market, it stands out with its ability to preserve all activity and information. Through this method, the company can ensure that the insights produced are comprehensive, contextual, and bespoke. Stairwell has seen consistent funding over the years, testament to the success of its offering. Investment acquired in 2022 will fund team expansion, including the hiring of specialized engineers to increase functionality.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Oct 2022
$45m
SERIES B
Sep 2021
$20m
SERIES A
Total funding: $69.5m
Company HQ
Heritage District, Sunnyvale, CA
Leadership
Mike Wiacek
(CEO)Experience as Co-founder and Chief Security Officer of Alphabet's Chronicle from 2015 to 2019. Information Security Engineer and Principal Software Engineer for Google from 2006 to 2019.
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