Director of Engineering - Environmental Realism

Shape the Engineering Organization Behind the Future of Agentic Cybersecurity

Artificial intelligence is transforming cybersecurity, and organizations need realistic environments to build, train, test, and operationalize AI-powered cyber capabilities with confidence.

At SimSpace, we've built one of the industry's leading AI Proving Grounds, enabling cybersecurity vendors, Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies, and military organizations to evaluate the next generation of cyber technologies in realistic environments.

We're significantly expanding our investment in Environmental Realism—one of SimSpace's most strategic product areas. As Director of Engineering , you'll lead and grow the engineering organization responsible for the capabilities that make our cyber environments behave like the real world. You'll help shape both the technology and the organization as we scale one of SimSpace's most important engineering investments.

Environmental Realism spans capabilities such as attack simulation , user activity , enterprise infrastructure , cloud services , SaaS applications , environmental automation , and AI-assisted environment generation . These capabilities power experiences across multiple products and engineering teams, making this role highly collaborative and central to SimSpace's long-term strategy.

What You'll Do

Build and Scale a High-Performing Engineering Organization

• Lead and grow a rapidly expanding engineering organization through Engineering Managers, hiring exceptional talent while building a culture of technical excellence , ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Develop Engineering Managers into organizational leaders who think beyond individual teams and optimize for company-wide outcomes.
• Build an engineering culture that values customer impact , predictable delivery , software quality , and operational excellence .

Build a Customer-First Engineering Culture

Environmental Realism provides foundational capabilities used across SimSpace.

• Foster a customer-first mindset where internal product and engineering teams are treated as customers.
• Build reusable, well-designed capabilities that are easy to adopt, well documented, and enable other teams to deliver differentiated customer experiences faster.
• Drive a culture that values platform usability , developer experience , automation , and long-term engineering leverage alongside technical sophistication.

Lead Cross-Functional Execution

Environmental Realism spans multiple engineering organizations and product areas.

• Partner closely with Product Management to translate long-term product vision into engineering strategy and execution.
• Build strong partnerships across Engineering, Product, UX, Cyber Subject Matter Experts, Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing to align priorities and deliver coordinated outcomes.
• Lead through influence, bringing together multiple teams around shared goals while balancing competing priorities, technical dependencies, and customer needs.

Drive the Technical Evolution of Environmental Realism

• Guide the engineering strategy behind capabilities including attack simulation , user activity , enterprise networking , operating systems , cloud services , SaaS applications , environmental automation , and AI-assisted environment generation .
• Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers to define architecture, engineering standards, and technical direction while balancing long-term platform investments with pragmatic delivery.
• Champion modern engineering practices including automated testing , observability , security , operational ownership , reliability , and developer productivity .
• Ensure Environmental Realism continues to evolve toward increasingly realistic enterprise behavior for both human operators and autonomous AI agents.
• Help define how realism is measured and continuously improved, ensuring simulated environments remain credible representations of real-world enterprise operations.

Who You Are

• You began your career as a software engineer and have retained strong technical judgment as your leadership responsibilities expanded.
• You enjoy building organizations as much as building technology.
• You understand that realistic systems emerge from the interaction of users, networks, applications, infrastructure, cloud services, and adversary behavior—not from any single feature.
• You naturally think in terms of systems, platforms, reusable capabilities, and long-term engineering leverage.
• You believe engineering organizations succeed when the teams they support are successful.
• You know how to balance architectural rigor with pragmatic execution .
• You lead through influence, technical credibility, and strong communication, including across organizations that do not report directly to you.
• You enjoy building engineering organizations during periods of rapid growth and investment.

Qualifications

Required

• 8+ years of significant hands-on software engineering experience followed by progressive engineering leadership responsibility.
• Experience leading Engineering Managers and multiple software engineering teams.
• Experience building complex distributed systems , infrastructure platforms , networking technologies , platform services , simulation technologies , or similarly sophisticated software products.
• Strong systems thinking with the ability to reason across software, infrastructure, networking, cloud services, APIs, automation, and distributed systems.
• Demonstrated success scaling engineering organizations while improving delivery predictability , quality , and operational maturity .
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and build alignment across organizational boundaries.
• Experience partnering closely with Product Management and senior technical leaders to translate strategy into engineering execution.
• Experience hiring, developing, and mentoring engineering leaders and building high-performing engineering cultures.

Preferred

Experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Cybersecurity platforms
• AI or agentic systems
• Cyber ranges or simulation technologies
• Enterprise networking
• Cloud infrastructure
• Platform engineering
• Digital twins
• Autonomous systems
• Government or defense technologies
• Operational Technology (OT) or Industrial Control Systems (ICS)