Head of Security Research

Builds and leads Dropzone AI's security research and engineering team, which is reworking alert investigation, hunting, detection engineering and threat intelligence for an era of AI agents. The head reports directly to the founder and CEO and works remotely in the US as a player-coach.

The role sets research and engineering direction while staying in the technical work: writing detections, responding to new CVEs, reviewing noisy alerts and hunting attackers. The head recruits experts across detection and response and sets a culture of rigorous research and quick iteration. The team builds evaluation frameworks to check that the analysis produced by Dropzone's SOC agents matches what skilled practitioners would conclude, owns the process of encoding expert judgement and technique into the agents, and works with engineering to improve their accuracy in live deployments. It also prototypes ideas that unlimited analytical capacity could make possible, tests assumptions about how AI belongs in security operations, and gives practitioner input to the product roadmap, with the head acting as a public voice on autonomous defence.

Dropzone wants eight or more years in detection and response across security engineering, hunting, SOC or incident response, three or more managing security engineers, hunters or analysts, and experience building SOC functions, detection programmes or research teams while staying hands-on. Published research, startup experience and familiarity with AI coding agents are pluses.