Director of Engineering, OPSWAT

• 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

Desirable

• Reports to: VP, Products
• OPSWAT, a global leader in IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure cybersecurity, delivers an end-to-end platform that gives public and private sector organizations and enterprises the critical advantage they need to protect their complex networks, secure their devices, and ensure compliance
• Trusted by more than 1,700 organizations, governments, and institutions worldwide — including many of the world’s largest governments, utilities, financial institutions, and defense contractors — OPSWAT protects the systems that keep society running
• MetaDefender Email Security is OPSWAT’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 — MetaDefender Email Gateway Security, deployed on-premises in front of existing mail servers, and MetaDefender Cloud Email Security, which augments Microsoft 365 — each embedding OPSWAT’s threat prevention technology, including Deep CDR™ Technology, Metascan Multiscanning, Proactive DLP, and Predictive Alin AI, directly into the mail flow
• 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 MetaDefender 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 OPSWAT’s 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, or near an OPSWAT-operated location
• 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
• Lead a product trusted by critical infrastructure customers across air-gapped, cross-domain, internet-connected, and native-cloud deployments — the architecture and culture decisions you make now will shape it for years
• Influence beyond this product: the AI-native patterns you establish will propagate across OPSWAT’s engineering portfolio