Senior Director, AI Security Systems (Remote)

CrowdStrike Inc.; California; Hybrid; USD 235,000 - 355,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity awards

Comprehensive benefits

Paid time off

Career development

Job summary

CrowdStrike is seeking a Senior Director to build and lead the Lab’s AI security systems organization, turning frontier models and autonomous agents into production capabilities on the Falcon sensor and cloud platforms, focusing on latency, scale and security. You will set strategy, hire leaders, define OKRs, and drive performance across endpoint and cloud deployments.

You will collaborate with Falcon engineering, product management, threat intelligence and executives to translate complex

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive industry experience in software engineering, machine learning or security engineering.
• 8+ years managing engineering or applied research teams and 4+ years leading managers across multiple teams.
• Concrete experience building AI and security systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a world-class organization.
• Hire, lead and grow multi-team engineering managers, principal engineers and research scientists.
• Define the multi-year technical strategy for the Lab’s AI security systems and set OKRs.

Skills

Leadership

AI security

Distributed systems

Security engineering

Executive communication

Tools

GPU inference stacks

Kernel telemetry

Job description

As a global leader in cybersecurity, CrowdStrike protects the people, processes and technologies that drive modern organizations. Since 2011, our mission hasn’t changed — we’re here to stop breaches, and we’ve redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced AI-native platform. We work on large scale distributed systems, processing almost 3 trillion events per day and this traffic is growing daily. Our customers span all industries, and they count on CrowdStrike to keep their businesses running, their communities safe and their lives moving forward. We're proud to work for a mission-driven company leveraging AI to transform the way we work. CrowdStrikers drive their careers through flexibility and autonomy while also being expected to contribute to a culture of responsible AI adoption, experimentation, and innovation. We use an AI-first mindset as a force multiplier to proactively and continuously accelerate execution, build expertise, uncover insights, and solve complex problems. We’re always looking to add talented CrowdStrikers to the team who have limitless passion, a relentless focus on innovation and a fanatical commitment to our customers, our community and each other. Ready to join a mission that matters? The future of cybersecurity starts with you.

About The Role

We are looking for a Senior Director to build and lead the organization that turns the Lab’s research into AI security systems running in the real world. You will lead teams of engineers and research scientists who take frontier models and autonomous agents from promising results to production capabilities, on the Falcon sensor, where every millisecond, megabyte and CPU cycle counts, and across the cloud, where systems reason over trillions of events every day. This role combines people leadership, technical depth and strategic influence. You will set the engineering strategy and roadmap, hire and develop exceptional leaders, and own delivery of systems that customers depend on. You will also stay close enough to the technology to challenge an architecture, debate a model choice with researchers and explain the tradeoffs clearly to executives. You will build for what is possible today while preparing the organization for what the next 12 to 24 months of model and agent capability will make possible. If you have built and led the teams that shipped AI to stop adversaries in production, on the endpoint or at cloud scale, and you want to define what autonomous cyber defense looks like next, we want to talk.

About The Lab

AI is changing cyber offense and defense at the same time. Adversaries now use models to inspect code, hunt for vulnerabilities, adapt tooling and run longer operations, and the fastest eCrime breakouts are measured in seconds. CrowdStrike built the Cybersecurity Superintelligence Lab to make sure defenders stay ahead. The Lab is CrowdStrike’s frontier AI research organization for cyber defense. We advance the science and engineering of AI for security, rapidly evaluate the best available technologies, and move the strongest results into capabilities that protect customers. Our work spans frontier models, open-weight models, CrowdStrike-trained models, specialized agents, reinforcement learning, evaluation and secure deployment. We build on three advantages few organizations can match: trillions of Falcon events every day, more than a decade of adversary intelligence and expert-validated outcomes, and high-fidelity environments where offensive and defensive AI can attack, defend, learn and prove what works against what enterprises actually run.

What You'll Do

• Build and lead a world-class organization.
• Hire, lead and grow a multi-team organization of engineering managers, principal engineers and research scientists.
• Build a culture of ownership, rigor, speed and technical excellence that attracts the best talent from security companies and frontier AI labs.
• Own the strategy and roadmap.
• Define the multi-year technical strategy for the Lab’s AI security systems, set clear OKRs and success metrics, and make the investment calls on where the organization spends its people, compute and time.
• Deliver frontier AI on the endpoint.
• Lead programs that put intelligence on the sensor under strict latency, memory and power budgets, using distillation, quantization and specialized models tightly integrated with kernel- and user-mode telemetry, without compromising sensor stability or performance.
• Deliver AI at cloud scale.
• Lead the streaming detection, inference and agent platforms that operate over trillions of events per day, with GPU-efficient serving, intelligent model routing and disciplined management of cost, latency and reliability.
• Take autonomous defense to production.
• Drive the delivery of agentic systems that investigate, hunt, write and validate detections, and drive response and remediation, including closed-loop systems where offensive and defensive AI make each other stronger.
• Turn research into capability.
• Build the operating model that moves the strongest Lab results into the Falcon platform quickly and safely, with clear handoffs, shared infrastructure and accountability from prototype to general availability.
• Set the bar for trust and evaluation.
• Establish the benchmarks, cyber ranges and evaluation practices that measure security efficacy, false-positive cost, reliability, latency and spend.
• Build AI that holds up against evasion, poisoning, prompt injection and tool abuse, with guardrails fit for autonomous action in customer environments.
• Lead across CrowdStrike.
• Partner with Falcon engineering, product management, threat intelligence, frontline services and executive leadership to align the Lab’s work with the company’s technology and business strategy.
• Communicate with clarity.
• Report strategy, progress, risks and investment opportunities to senior executives, and translate complex technical tradeoffs into decisions.
• Represent CrowdStrike externally.
• Build relationships with frontier AI labs, infrastructure partners, universities and the security research community, and represent the Lab through talks, publications and collaborations.

What You'll Need

• Education and experience. BS, MS or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics or a related technical field (advanced degree preferred). 15+ years of progressive industry experience in software engineering, machine learning or security engineering, including 8+ years managing engineering or applied research teams and 4+ years leading managers across multiple teams.
• Concrete experience building AI and security systems.
• A track record of leading the architecture, delivery and operation of AI or ML systems for security in production, either on the endpoint (for example on-sensor ML, EDR/XDR, kernel telemetry, resource-constrained inference) or at cloud scale (for example distributed detection pipelines, streaming analytics, large-scale model serving).
• You can point to the systems your teams built and the outcomes they delivered.
• Technical depth in modern AI.
• A strong working command of large language models and agentic architectures (planning, tool use, memory, context management), post-training (SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, DPO/GRPO), evaluation and inference optimization, deep enough to guide architecture and challenge technical decisions.
• Security domain expertise.
• Significant experience in areas such as detection and response, threat hunting, malware analysis, vulnerability research, adversary tradecraft (MITRE ATT&CK) or security automation.
• Systems at scale.
• Experience leading teams that build distributed systems, high-throughput data infrastructure and GPU inference stacks with demanding requirements for reliability, performance and cost.
• Proven organizational leadership.
• A record of building high-performing teams from the ground up, developing leaders, managing performance and scaling an organization while keeping the technical bar high.
• Executive influence.
• Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to set direction, drive alignment across organizations and present clear recommendations to senior executives.
• Proven experience utilizing AI technologies to enhance decision-making, streamline workflows and processes, improve efficiency and drive business outcomes.

Bonus Points

• Cybersecurity industry experience. Leadership experience at a leading cybersecurity company across endpoint, cloud, identity, SIEM or threat intelligence is a strong plus.
• Frontier AI lab experience. Leadership or technical experience at a frontier AI lab in pre-training, post-training, reinforcement learning, inference, evaluation or safety is a strong plus.
• Adversarial and offensive AI. Experience with adversarial machine learning, red teaming of AI systems, autonomous cyber reasoning systems (for example AIxCC or DARPA CGC-style work) or AI-driven offensive security.
• Platforms that multiply teams. Experience leading extensible AI or agentic platforms that let many teams develop, evaluate, optimize and deploy AI applications safely at scale.
• Building new organizations. Experience standing up a new lab, research group or engineering organization and scaling it through rapid growth.
• Recognized technical contributions. Publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, ACM CCS or NDSS, along with patents, influential open-source projects or conference talks spanning AI and security.

WHY JOIN THE LAB

• Frontier work with real consequences. The systems your organization ships will protect organizations that keep economies, hospitals and critical infrastructure running.
• Data and environments no one else has.
• Trillions of daily Falcon events, deep adversary intelligence and high-fidelity cyber environments to test against reality.
• Founding-era influence. You will help shape the structure, culture and technical standards of a new frontier lab from the start.
• World-class collaborators. You will work alongside AI researchers, offensive operators, threat hunters and incident responders who understand how real attacks happen and how they are stopped.

Benefits of Working at CrowdStrike

• Market leader in compensation and equity awards
• Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs
• Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge
• Paid parental and adoption leaves
• Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role
• Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections
• Vibrant office culture with world class amenities
• Great Place to Work Certified™ across the globe

We support veterans and individuals with disabilities through our affirmative action program.

CrowdStrike is committed to fostering a culture of belonging where everyone is valued for who they are and empowered to succeed. We support veterans and individuals with disabilities through our affirmative action program. CrowdStrike is committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all employees and applicants for employment. The Company does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy or pregnancy-related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical disability (including HIV and AIDS), mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, membership or activity in a local human rights commission, status with regard to public assistance, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We base all employment decisions--including recruitment, selection, training, compensation, benefits, discipline, promotions, transfers, lay-offs, return from lay-off, terminations and social/recreational programs--on valid job requirements.

CrowdStrike participates in the E-Verify program.

Notice of E-Verify Participation Right to Work CrowdStrike, Inc. is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. Placement within the pay range is dependent on a variety of factors including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications, job level, supervisory status, and location.

The base salary range for this position for all U.S. candidates is $235,000 - $355,000 per year, with eligibility for bonuses, equity grants and a comprehensive benefits package that includes health insurance, 401k and paid time off.

CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 to fix a fundamental problem: The sophisticated attacks that were forcing the world’s leading businesses into the headlines could not be solved with existing malware-based defenses. Founder George Kurtz realized that a brand new approach was needed — one that combines the most advanced endpoint protection with expert intelligence to pinpoint the adversaries perpetrating the attacks, not just the malware. There’s much more to the story of how Falcon has redefined endpoint protection but there’s only one thing to remember about CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.