Threat Research Leader

Overview

We are seeking a hands-on Threat Research Leader to lead a team of senior threat researchers. You will set the team's research agenda, coach the researchers on it, and stay close enough to the technical work to guide direction credibly — a player-coach who leads through both judgment and craft.

You will define how the team tracks Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), emerging malware, and vulnerabilities, and ensure those outputs land in our products through tight collaboration with engineering and product. Equally important: you will lead the team into the AI era — building AI-native workflows into how the team triages, reverses, hunts, and publishes — so the team operates at a fundamentally higher leverage than a traditional research group.

Key Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Talent Development: Lead, coach, and grow a team of senior threat researchers. Own hiring, performance management, and retention. Build individual development plans for each researcher, create the conditions for IC career growth (Senior → Staff → Principal), and act as a technical mentor — not just a people manager — given the seniority of the team.

• Research Strategy & Execution: Set the team's research direction across threat tracking, reverse engineering, malware analysis, and vulnerability research. Plan quarterly research priorities, make explicit trade-offs between depth and breadth, and anticipate where the threat landscape is heading 12–18 months out so the team is investing ahead of the curve — not chasing it. Align the agenda with product and engineering roadmaps.

• AI-Native Operating Model: Lead the team into the AI era. Integrate LLMs, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted tooling into the team's day-to-day — malware triage, reverse engineering, IOC enrichment, report drafting, hypothesis generation. Set the bar for what "AI-native threat research" looks like in practice and continuously raise it as the tooling evolves.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as a critical bridge, collaborating closely with technical directors, engineering managers, and product managers to translate research insights into core product detection enhancements.

• Thought Leadership: Build the team's external research brand. Champion high-quality whitepapers, technical blogs, CVE disclosures, and conference talks at top-tier venues (Black Hat, DEF CON, HITCON). Position the team as a credible voice on emerging topics — including AI-driven threats and AI-assisted defense — to elevate the company's authority in the security domain.

Qualifications

• Experience: 8+ years in cybersecurity research, including 2+ years managing or leading a research team. Demonstrated track record of growing senior ICs — promotions earned under your leadership, retention of strong performers, IC-to-manager transitions you've coached.

• Technical Foundation: Deep, hands-on background in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), Reverse Engineering, Incident Response (IR), or Vulnerability Research (previously operating at a Senior/Principal Researcher level). Must remain technical enough to guide research direction and review work credibly.

• AI-Era Mindset: Active user and advocate of AI tooling in security workflows. Opinions on where LLMs and agentic systems help vs. mislead in threat research. Hands-on experimentation expected — not just awareness.

• Strategic Thinking: Track record of setting research agendas that shipped into product, making explicit prioritization trade-offs, and anticipating threat trends ahead of the market. Comfortable defending a research direction with evidence and adjusting it when the evidence changes.

• Management & Communication: Proven cross-border, cross-timezone collaboration and stakeholder management. Ability to translate complex technical work into business context for executive leadership and cross-functional teams.

• Language Skills: Excellent proficiency in English, with the ability to seamlessly participate in and lead global technical decision-making meetings.