Director of Engineering

Job Description: Director of Engineering

About Latent Defense

Latent Defense is building the world model for cybersecurity; the product graphs a company's entire system across all layers, identifies all attack paths and assigns criticality rankings, and provides remediation for each path. The team is building an autonomous system that rigorously models attack paths, orchestrates agents to validate each path, and remediates confirmed vulnerabilities at every step of the attack chain. Latent Defense is a small, seed-stage team scaling from a sharp early product into something that runs autonomously across real-world environments, from git repos to cloud deployments.

About the Role

Latent Defense's engineering team has grown to four engineers in addition to the two founders, and the company is hiring its first Director of Engineering to help scale the team while staying deeply technical. This person will manage and grow the engineering org, owning hiring, onboarding, and performance while partnering closely with the founders and product team on roadmap and prioritization. They'll stay hands‑on enough to go deep on hard technical problems across the stack, from agent orchestration to hardened model deployments to infrastructure and on‑premise deployment in customer systems. They will be responsible for delivering engineering efforts and product features on time, including successful deployments of our product into customer environments.

This is a hybrid role based in NYC (Nomad, 26th & 6th), with a minimum of 3 days/week in the office.

What You'll Do

• Build and lead the engineering team as it scales beyond its current four engineers, owning hiring, onboarding, mentoring, coaching, and performance

• Stay hands‑on across the stack: agent orchestration (MCP servers, SSE/STDIO transports), model packaging and deployment, infrastructure, and deployment in customer environments

• Partner closely with product and founders on roadmap, prioritization, and translating technical tradeoffs into clear execution plans

• Set technical direction and review architecture for the autonomous threat modeling system, from agent workflows to remediation loops

• Build and champion the observability and telemetry practices that let the team measure and improve system‑wide efficacy

• Own delivery rigor and quality (sprint planning, code review standards, engineering process, testing, deployment, and scaling) as the team grows

• Represent engineering in cross‑functional planning and, where needed, in technical conversations with customers and prospects

• Hold the team, and yourself, to a security‑first bar: if you're selling security, your own house has to be airtight

• Be the ultimate owner of successful delivery of the product into customer environments – error‑free, durable, scalable, secure, and feature complete

What You Bring

• Very senior engineering background with deep, hands‑on technical depth; not a purely managerial background

• Proven track record in managing and growing engineering teams, including sourcing, interviewing, and closing senior technical talent. Able to work with younger engineers and maximize their potential with coaching and mentorship

• Experience operating inside a startup or seed‑stage environment. Comfortable with ambiguity and a small team building fast

• Background in enterprise software, ideally with a highly complex technical product

• Experience running projects that deploy in customer environments and dealing with the associated engineering challenges

• Strong cross‑functional collaborator, especially with product, able to translate between technical and business priorities; able to communicate status, risk, progress, and timing of product deliverables

• Comfortable operating across the stack: TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL, Docker/Kubernetes, and hybrid deployment patterns

• Agent native, stays up to date with AI tools and best practices. Specifically understands Claude Code and its powers on a deep level; workflows, integrations, bring‑your‑own‑MCP, and best practices for skills and agents.

• Ability to coach, mentor, and guide engineers of all levels

• Hands‑on systems thinker and builder - systems thinking as a first principle

Nice to Haves

• Prior experience at a cybersecurity or security‑adjacent company

• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks, LLM‑based systems, or MCP‑style protocols

• Experience in packaging or deploying ML models in hardened, IP‑safe environments

• Experience deploying in ‘bring your own cloud’ and on‑premises customer environments

What You'll Get

• Base Salary: $230,000-$260,000

• Ground‑floor leadership role at a fast‑moving, seed‑stage security startup

• Direct partnership with the CEO/cofounder and the founding engineering team

• Top of market health insurance and unlimited PTO

• Hybrid role based in NYC (Nomad, 26th & 6th), minimum 3 days/week in office

What We Value

Latent Defense believes cybersecurity should be proactive, not reactive. The team values leaders and engineers who think adversarially by default, build mental models of new domains quickly, and care as much about the lifecycle of what they build — observability, testing, scale, trust — as whether it works today.