Head of AI-Driven Security Research (Remote)

Dropzone AI; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401K with employer match

Self-Managed PTO

Parental leave

Job summary

Dropzone AI is hiring a Head of Security Research to lead a team of expert engineers and practitioners reimagining threat intelligence, hunting, detection engineering, and alert investigation in the GenAI era.

This player/coach role blends hands-on work with building an elite security engineering and research team, reporting to the founder/CEO and partnering with product and engineering to ensure top-quality agent-based security.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in detection and response with security engineering, threat hunting, SOC, or incident response.
• 3+ years 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.

Responsibilities

• Lead & Build a High-Impact Security Engineering and Research Team, including detection and response.
• Act as a player/coach, setting strategic research directions while contributing technically.
• Establish a culture of high-quality research, rapid iteration, and operator-first thinking.
• Drive Product Effectiveness by building measurement and evaluation frameworks for agent outputs.
• Own the encoding of expert intuitions into the agentic system and collaborate with engineering.
• Continuously improve the efficacy of agents in real-world deployments.
• Reimagine detection and response with agents by prototyping new ideas for autonomous defense.
• ShapeDropzone’s product roadmap with field experience and real-world operations.

Skills

Security engineering

Threat hunting

SOC

Incident response

Team management

Mentoring

Product/engineering collaboration

Startup mindset

Tools

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Job description

Dropzone AI is hiring a Head of Security Research to lead a team of expert engineers and practitioners reimagining threat intelligence, hunting, detection engineering, and alert investigation in the GenAI era.

This player/coach role blends hands-on work with building an elite security engineering and research team, reporting to the founder/CEO and partnering with product and engineering to ensure top-quality agent-based security.