Head of Security Research

Dropzone AI

2d•Remote

About The Position

We’re hiring a Head of Security Research to lead a team of expert security engineers and practitioners to reimagine key cyber defense functions like threat intelligence, hunting, detection engineering, and alert investigation in the Agentic AI era. This is a player/coach management role for someone who still loves being hands-on, writing detections, responding to latest CVEs, reviewing noisy alerts, and hunting attackers, but also knows how to build an elite security engineering and research team and set a high technical bar. You’ll be directly reporting to the founder/CEO and collaborating closely with the rest of product and engineering teams to ensure Dropzone SOC agents are as good as expert human practitioners.

Requirements

8+ years in detection and response with strong experience in security engineering, threat hunting, SOC, or incident response
3+ years experience managing a team of security engineers, threat hunters, SOC analysts, etc
Background in building and running SOC functions, detection programs, or security research teams
Proven experience leading high-performing technical teams while staying hands-on
Able to mentor across multiple domains (detections, intel, IR) without being siloed
Opinionated about what world-class looks like in threat intelligence, hunting, detection engineering, SOC, and IR
Able to collaborate closely with engineering and product teams
Early-stage startup mindset. You thrive on ambiguity and move with lightspeed execution

Nice To Haves

Background in building commercial products or security services
Familiar with AI agents like Claude Code and OpenClaw
Experience publishing security research or contributing to the broader security community
Experience working with product marketing and field teams to evangelize new security technology
Founder or early-stage (first 10 engineers) or experience in standing up a new technology bet within a more established company

Responsibilities

Lead & Build a High-Impact Security Engineering and Research Team
Build a team of elite security engineers and world-class domain experts across Detection and Response, including alert investigation, threat hunting, detection engineering, and threat intelligence
Act as a player/coach, setting strategic research and engineering directions while staying deeply involved in technical work
Establish a culture of high-quality research, rapid iteration, and operator-first thinking
Build and refine measurement and evaluation frameworks to ensure the analysis our agents produced is high quality and mirrors expert human outputs
Owns the process of encoding expert human intuitions and techniques into our agentic system
Work closely with rest of engineering to continuously improve the efficacy of our agents in real world deployments
Prototype and test new ideas where unlimited analytical capacity can fundamentally change cyber defense
Serve as a key voice in shaping Dropzone’s product roadmap based on real-world operation experience
Pressure-test assumptions about how AI should be applied in security operations
Help define what “autonomous defense system” actually looks like in practice and be an industry thought leader around it