Director of Engineering - MetaDefender Email Security

Job Description

Director of Engineering — MetaDefender Email Security

Reports to: VP, Products

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 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.

The Product: MetaDefender Email Security

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, 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.

About This Role

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.

What You Will Be Doing

• 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.

What We Need From You

• 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.

It Would Be Nice If You Had

• Domain familiarity: understanding of email as a communication channel and the underlying technology and protocols. Appreciation of the different deployment methods for email security and their characteristics.
• Cloud services familiarity: experience of 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 for consistent, safe AI output across a team.
• AI in CI/CD pipelines: familiarity running AI agents inside pipelines — auto-fixing lint, generating missing tests, or running safe migrations as pipeline steps — not as experiments, but as how the team actually works.
• 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.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• 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.
• Work from anywhere — a worldwide, remote-friendly role with a preference for the UK, USA, or a location near an OPSWAT-operated country.
• 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.

OPSWAT is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to providing an environment where equal employment opportunities are extended to all employees and applicants, free of discrimination and harassment of any type. All employment decisions are based on individual qualifications, job requirements, and business needs without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other category protected by federal, state, or local laws.

Recruiting Agencies: we do not accept unsolicited resumes from third party agencies for any of our open positions. To submit resumes for our jobs, there must be a recruiting contract approved by our legal team and endorsed by both parties. We are currently not accepting additional 3rd party agencies at this time.