Director of Engineering - MetaDefender Email Security

About the role

The Director of Engineering will lead the engineering efforts for MetaDefender Email Security, a portfolio of email threat prevention products trusted by governments and critical infrastructure operators. The role involves owning the architecture, delivery, quality, and teams that build these products, which operate in various deployment forms from air-gapped high security environments to native-cloud deployments.

Responsibilities

• Lead as an AI-first effort, making AI agents a first-class part of the team's workflow.
• Stay hands-on in the codebase, setting architecture patterns, writing, and reviewing critical code, and solving hard technical problems.
• Own end-to-end delivery of the roadmap, transforming "what to ship" into "how to build," and managing technical risk, quality, security, and release across all deployment forms.
• Set technical direction, driving architecture and technology choices for high-assurance environments at scale.
• Build and lead a high-performance team, recruiting, developing, and retaining top engineers and their leads across Romania and Hungary.
• Drive performance-based management, setting clear, measurable expectations and running a rigorous, fair performance culture.
• Hold a security-first quality bar, championing code review with a security lens for both human-written and AI-generated code.
• Raise engineering velocity by continuously improving how the team works, including CI/CD pipelines, AI-assisted development workflows, incident response, and operational maturity.
• Codify AI-native practices for the portfolio, establishing playbooks, AI context files, coding harnesses, test frameworks, and review norms.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product Management, Design, and security leaders to turn the product roadmap into engineering execution, committing to scope and timelines, and pushing back on trade-offs when necessary.

Requirements

• Full agency development experience, having personally run a full agency, AI-powered SDLC in B2B and high-security enterprise environments.
• A product launched via a full agency, AI-powered SDLC, with accountability for the outcome.
• Proven engineering leadership with 8+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years leading engineering teams, including managing managers/leads.
• Performance-based leadership, building high-performing teams through rigorous, fair performance management.
• Deep technical excellence, strong software engineering fundamentals, and a solid command of design patterns, SOLID principles, and modern architecture.
• Scalable systems experience, 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, and using AI to accelerate test scaffolding.
• Distributed-team leadership, leading and aligning engineers across countries and time zones.
• Talent magnet and clear communicator, identifying strong engineers and creating an environment where they thrive.
• Security-conscious by default, holding the team to a security-first bar on design, code review, and incident response.

Qualifications

• Experience in email security and understanding of email as a communication channel and underlying technology and protocols.
• Experience integrating products with M365 and/or Google Workspace and their associated API ecosystems.
• Hands-on or managerial experience with .NET Core / C#.
• Experience leading the design or operation of cloud-native SaaS platforms, including Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS/Azure/GCP.
• Experience writing AI context files and running AI agents inside pipelines.
• International team experience, building and maintaining engineering culture and delivery quality across multiple countries and time zones.
• Experience validating concurrency and thread-safety in high-throughput services.

Skills

• Agentic development experience.
• Cloud services familiarity.
• .NET / C# ecosystem expertise.
• Cloud-native and containers experience.
• AI context-file authoring.
• AI in CI/CD pipelines.
• International team experience.
• Async and high-throughput systems experience.

Benefits

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.

Pay

Competitive salary and benefits package.

Schedule

Flexible working hours to accommodate global time zones.