Senior Director of Engineering, Sophos
X-Ops Platform
Cybersecurity-as-a-Service
Open for applications
Cybersecurity-as-a-Service
1001+ employees
Open for applications
1001+ employees
Company mission
To develop powerful and intuitive products and services that provide the world's most effective cybersecurity for organizations of any size.
Role
Who you are
- Cyber Security background and acumen
- Significant engineering leadership experience, including leading leaders and scaling teams in a platform, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or operations-focused environment
- Strong track record of building reliable, secure platforms and improving developer productivity through pragmatic, outcome-driven investment
- Experience establishing operational excellence practices (incident response, on-call, observability, SLOs, post-incident learning) and driving continuous improvement
- Ability to set strategy and translate it into execution via roadmaps, prioritisation, and clear measures of success
- Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills, with the ability to align across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and Finance
- Commercial and financial acumen, including experience with cloud cost management, budgeting, and performance metrics
- Commitment to responsible AI adoption—setting guardrails, enabling teams, and demonstrating measurable improvements in productivity and quality
- Don't let a checklist hold you back – we encourage you to apply
Desirable
- Experience building and operating platforms at scale in a SaaS environment, ideally with multi-region cloud deployment
- Familiarity with modern CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerisation, and observability tooling
- Strong security and compliance mindset; experience partnering with security teams to embed controls into platform capabilities
- Experience with organisational design, operating cadence, and change management in a complex engineering organisation
- Exposure to FinOps practices and tooling, including unit cost models and cost allocation/chargeback approaches
- Comfort working with technical teams and/or technical concepts
- Experience improving processes, introducing new ways of working, or leading small change initiatives
- Experience with AI-assisted productivity or development tools in a professional setting
What the job involves
- We are seeking a Sr Director of Engineering to lead our X-Ops Platform organization
- The leader will be responsible for all aspects of the platform ranging from vision, strategy and roadmap to product delivery and service execution
- The leader will coordinate with stakeholders to align business priorities and support engineering teams in delivering secure, high-quality software at scale using modern AI technologies
- You will set strategy and standards for how we build, run, and improve our platforms and operational tooling across the engineering lifecycle - partnering closely with Product, Security, IT, and Engineering leaders
- Success in this role looks like improved developer productivity, strong service reliability and resilience, clear operational governance, and efficiency in cloud and platform spend and close alignment with Sophos X-Ops goals
- You bring enough technical depth to challenge and support senior engineers and architects, while spending most of your time enabling teams, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring execution against clear outcomes
- You will have a strong grounding in Cyber Security, Cloud Computing and AI frameworks and development practices
- You will lead and grow multiple teams and managers, fostering strong engineering practices and a culture of ownership
- You will collaborate with senior stakeholders across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and Finance to ensure platform roadmaps and operational priorities support company goals
- Set the vision, strategy, and operating model for the X-Ops Platform organisation (e.g., Delivery Roadmap, AI First Developer Experience, CI/CD, Observability, SRE, Cloud & Infrastructure Enablement)
- Lead, coach, and develop engineering leaders (directors, managers and senior ICs), building high-performing teams with clear ownership and strong engineering culture
- Own platform reliability, resilience, and operational excellence: incident management, on-call standards, SLIs/SLOs, post-incident learning, and continuous improvement
- Partner with product engineering and threat research leaders to improve productivity and delivery throughput across the software and service lifecycle
- Drive cloud efficiency and cost transparency (FinOps): budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and optimisation initiatives in partnership with Finance and Engineering
- Establish platform governance and standards (architecture, security, compliance, data handling, vendor/tooling choices) while enabling appropriate team autonomy
- Build strong cross-functional alignment peer X-Ops leaders, and other operational stakeholders to ensure aligned feature delivery and service operations
- Actively drive responsible AI adoption within the organisation:
- Establish guidance, guardrails, and enablement for approved AI tools and workflows
- Measure impact and promote best practices that improve quality, speed, and operational effectiveness while protecting sensitive data
- Define and track meaningful metrics and outcomes; communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to executive stakeholders
Our take
Due to the fast-evolving nature of cybercrime, companies can struggle to keep their security up-to-date and resilient. Sophos provides managed cybersecurity services to identify and resolve cyberthreats within all sizes of organisations, combining cutting edge cybersecurity tech with expert support teams.
Leveraging AI and machine learning, Sophos' system automates the detection and blocking of over 99% of threats, meaning its analysts only have to hunt down and stop the most sophisticated attackers. As well as its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) product - which, serving over 15,000 customers, is the most-used on the market - the company also delivers Incident Response Services for those experiencing an active threat.
Sophos is not a new player in the cybersecurity space, but has demonstrated its dedication to innovation with continued product launches, updates, and acquisitions such as that of BAE spinout SOC.OS that have kept its tech at the front of the market. Alongside many of its peers, the effects of the economic climate have caused Sophos to cut staff as it focusses on achieving “the optimal balance of growth and profitability", but this recent hiccup does not take away from its position as a market leader continuously leading adaption in the space.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (1 round)
Jul 2020
$2.8m
SEED
Total funding: $2.8m
Company benefits
- Remote-first working model & hybrid options
- We encourage teams to get together in person periodically to help facilitate teamwork
- Flexible start and end times for many roles
- Leadership development program
- Access to LinkedIn Learning
- Global internal coaching program (Coach Match)
- Periodic Sophos wellness days off for all Sophos to help employees relax and recharge
- Global wellbeing program, which offers a range of wellbeing resources, including Sophos Wellbeing Webinars, Stress Management Toolkits, and Developing Resilience Courses
- Free Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for confidential advice and counseling on a wide range of work and personal issues
- Free annual subscription to the Calm app
- Paid parental leave, caregiver leave & bereavement/compassion leave available
- We host some unforgettable social experiences for our global teams including our music festival SOPH-Fest, go-karting, Sophmudder, and incredible holiday parties!
- Our annual global fitness challenge, SOPH-Fit, sees thousands of employees taking part in our virtual global race around the world
- Each quarter, we celebrate our exceptional global team by running the Sophos Values Awards, which recognizes and rewards employees who embody the Sophos values and who we are as a company
- Health care benefits available worldwide
Company HQ
Abingdon, UK
Leadership
Joe Sophos
(CEO)Previously Sophos's CTo. Joe is also a member of Forgepoint Capital's Cybersecurity Advisory Council, a Venture Partner at Allegis Capital and a Board Member at Venafi.
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