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Director of Engineering - MetaDefender Email Security
Contract type
Ongoing
Work mode
Remote · Worldwide
Experience
Senior · 8+ years
Job description
Director of Engineering leading the MetaDefender Email Security portfolio, owning architecture, delivery, quality and the engineering teams across on-premises and cloud deployment models. The role is a hands-on, AI-native engineering leadership position reporting to the VP, Products.
At a glance
- Work mode
- Remote · Worldwide
What you'll do
- 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
- Stay hands-on: remain directly in the codebase — setting architecture patterns, writing and reviewing critical code, prototyping, and unblocking hard technical problems
- Own end-to-end delivery of the roadmap set by Product Management — execution sequencing, technical risk, quality, security, and release across every deployment form factor
- Set technical direction: drive the architecture and technology choices for a product serving high-assurance environments at scale
- 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
- Drive performance-based management: set clear, measurable expectations and run a rigorous, fair performance culture, addressing underperformance decisively
- 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
- Raise engineering velocity: continuously improve CI/CD pipelines, AI-assisted development workflows, incident response, and operational maturity
- Codify AI-native practices for the portfolio: establish playbooks, AI context files, coding harnesses, test frameworks, and review norms so other OPSWAT product teams can adopt them
- Partner cross-functionally with the VP, Products, Product Management, Design, and security leaders — committing to scope and timelines and pushing back clearly when trade-offs require it
What we're looking for
- Full agentic development experience: personally run a full agentic, AI-powered SDLC end-to-end, in B2B and high-security enterprise environments where compliance, data sensitivity, and assurance requirements are non-negotiable
- 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, with accountability 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
- Performance-based leadership: a track record of building high-performing teams through rigorous, fair performance management
- Deep technical excellence: strong, current software engineering fundamentals — design patterns, SOLID principles, and modern architecture; able to evaluate AI-assisted code with the same rigor as human-authored code
- 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; using AI to accelerate test scaffolding, then validating that coverage is real and meaningful
- Distributed-team leadership: demonstrated ability to lead and align engineers across countries and time zones in a remote/hybrid, multi-country setup
- Talent magnet and clear communicator: identify strong engineers, make a compelling case for why they should join, and communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders without oversimplifying
- Security-conscious by default: hold the team to a security-first bar on design, code review, and incident response
Nice to have
- Domain familiarity: understanding of email as a communication channel and the underlying technology and protocols; appreciation of the different deployment methods for email security
- Cloud services familiarity: experience integrating products with M365 and/or Google Workspace and their associated API ecosystems
- .NET / C# ecosystem: hands-on or managerial experience with .NET Core / C# — enough to evaluate architectural decisions, review PRs credibly, and hire well for the stack
- Cloud-native and containers: experience leading the design or operation of cloud-native SaaS platforms — Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS/Azure/GCP — including using AI agents to script infrastructure and deployment automation
- AI context-file authoring: experience writing AI context files (e.g., CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, or equivalent) that encode architecture decisions and forbidden patterns
- AI in CI/CD pipelines: familiarity running AI agents inside pipelines — auto-fixing lint, generating missing tests, or running safe migrations as pipeline steps
- International team experience: a track record of building and maintaining engineering culture and delivery quality across multiple countries and time zones
- Async and high-throughput systems: experience validating concurrency and thread-safety in high-throughput services
Your team
MetaDefender Email Security
Email threat prevention portfolio comprising MetaDefender Email Gateway Security (on-premises) and MetaDefender Cloud Email Security (augmenting Microsoft 365), embedding Deep CDR, Metascan Multiscanning, Proactive DLP, and Predictive Alin AI into the mail flow.
Benefits
Lead a product trusted by critical infrastructure customers across air-gapped, cross-domain, internet-connected, and native-cloud deployments
Work from anywhere — a worldwide, remote-friendly role with a preference for the UK, USA, or a location near an OPSWAT-operated country
- Influence beyond this product: the AI-native patterns you establish will propagate across OPSWAT's engineering portfolio
- Stable, growing international company with an exceptional customer base across 50+ countries
- A mandate to build AI-native engineering practices — and the latitude to do it your way
- Attractive compensation with regular performance assessments and flexibility for the right candidate
Apply
About OPSWAT
Protecting the World's Critical Infrastructure
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 needed to protect their complex networks, secure their devices, and ensure compliance.
Mission
To protect the world's critical infrastructure and secure our way of life.
Key facts
- IT, OT, and ICS critical infrastructure cybersecurity
- Over the last 20 years our commitment to innovative technology has earned the trust of more than 1,700 organizations, governments, and institutions globally
- 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
- Customer base across 50+ countries