Head of Security Research

Back to jobsHead of Security ResearchRemote - USApplyAbout Dropzone AI Dropzone’s mission is to scale cybersecurity beyond human limits, and augment every single human security engineer/analyst with an army of AI security specialists. Humans alone cannot sufficiently protect our digital future, and AI augmentation is the only way for defenders to reclaim the high ground. We are an award winning company disrupting the $200B+ cybersecurity market. Powered by Gen AI advancements, our technology offloads repetitive day-to-day work and frees human analysts to focus on real threats and higher-value projects. We are venture-backed, and our team has a rare blend of deep experience across cybersecurity, AI/ML, and SaaS product development. Join us if you want to be on the ground floor of using Gen AI to transform cyber defense. Learn more at www.dropzone.ai.About the role We’re hiring a Head of Security Research to lead a team of expert security engineers and practitioners to reimagine key cyber defense functions like threat intelligence, hunting, detection engineering, and alert investigation in the Agentic AI era. This is a player/coach management role for someone who still loves being hands-on, writing detections, responding to latest CVEs, reviewing noisy alerts, and hunting attackers, but also knows how to build an elite security engineering and research team and set a high technical bar. You’ll be directly reporting to the founder/CEO and collaborating closely with the rest of product and engineering teams to ensure Dropzone SOC agents are as good as expert human practitioners.   What You’ll Do Lead & Build a High-Impact Security Engineering and Research Team Build a team of elite security engineers and world-class domain experts across Detection and Response, including alert investigation, threat hunting, detection engineering, and threat intelligence Act as a player/coach, setting strategic research and engineering directions while staying deeply involved in technical work Establish a culture of high-quality research, rapid iteration, and operator-first thinking What Your Team’ll Do:  Drive Product Effectiveness Build and refine measurement and evaluation frameworks to ensure the analysis our agents produced is high quality and mirrors expert human outputs Owns the process of encoding expert human intuitions and techniques into our agentic system Work closely with rest of engineering to continuously improve the efficacy of our agents in real world deployments Reimagine Detection and Response with agents Prototype and test new ideas where unlimited analytical capacity can fundamentally change cyber defense Serve as a key voice in shaping Dropzone’s product roadmap based on real-world operation experience Pressure-test assumptions about how AI should be applied in security operations Help define what “autonomous defense system” actually looks like in practice and be an industry thought leader around it Requirements 8+ years in detection and response with strong experience in security engineering, threat hunting, SOC, or incident response 3+ years experience managing a team of security engineers, threat hunters, SOC analysts, etc Background in building and running SOC functions, detection programs, or security research teams Proven experience leading high-performing technical teams while staying hands-on Able to mentor across multiple domains (detections, intel, IR) without being siloed Opinionated about what world-class looks like in threat intelligence, hunting, detection engineering, SOC, and IR Able to collaborate closely with engineering and product teams Early-stage startup mindset. You thrive on ambiguity and move with lightspeed execution Nice to Have Background in building commercial products or security services Familiar with AI agents like Claude Code and OpenClaw Experience publishing security research or contributing to the broader security community Experience working with product marketing and field teams...