Head of Proactive Security

Nebius is seeking a Head of Proactive Security to establish and lead the Proactive Security pillar, reporting directly to the CISO. This leader will manage the Red Team, Penetration Testing, Threat Hunting, and Threat Intelligence teams.

The role involves anticipating relevant threats, challenging Nebius's defenses, identifying exploitable weaknesses, hunting for adversary activity, and converting findings into measurable security improvements.

Responsibilities:

• Pillar strategy and leadership: Define the Proactive Security strategy, operating model, roadmap, priorities, budget, and success measures.
• Build, lead, and develop high-performing teams.
• Create a unified intelligence-led program.
• Prioritize work based on crown jewels, material attack paths, emerging threats, and business risk.
• Establish clear team charters, engagement models, escalation paths, quality standards, and career-development frameworks.
• Provide the CISO and senior leadership with clear visibility into adversary exposure, validated weaknesses, emerging threats, and remediation progress.

Red Team and adversary emulation:

• Lead realistic, intelligence-led adversary simulations.
• Design campaigns that evaluate prevention, detection, response, escalation, and recovery capabilities.
• Develop and maintain adversary-emulation plans.
• Ensure every engagement operates under documented authorization, rules of engagement, safety controls, deconfliction procedures, and evidence-handling requirements.
• Deliver concise technical and executive reporting.

Penetration testing and continuous security validation:

• Own the risk-based penetration-testing program.
• Define testing standards, scoping criteria, methodologies, quality assurance, retesting, and reporting requirements.
• Coordinate internal testing and specialized external providers.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, and Security teams to integrate testing into major launches and high-risk initiatives.
• Track findings through validation, remediation, exception, and closure.

Threat hunting:

• Establish a hypothesis-driven threat-hunting program.
• Prioritize hunts using threat intelligence, incidents, environmental changes, control gaps, and emerging adversary techniques.
• Search for active, historical, or previously undetected malicious behavior.
• Turn validated hunt findings into new detections, telemetry requirements, response playbooks, hardening actions, and future hunt hypotheses.

Threat intelligence:

• Own Nebius's threat-intelligence strategy, collection priorities, analysis standards, dissemination model, and intelligence lifecycle.
• Maintain a current view of threat actors, campaigns, vulnerabilities, and techniques.
• Produce strategic, operational, and tactical threat intelligence.
• Translate intelligence into clear changes to security priorities, control coverage, red-team scenarios, hunt hypotheses, and incident readiness.

Defensive improvement and governance:

• Create a closed-loop process that converts proactive-security findings into owned, prioritized, and measurable remediation actions.
• Partner with Security Engineering, Detection and Response, Product Security, Cloud Security, IT, and Engineering to improve controls and reduce repeat findings.
• Ensure material findings are communicated promptly, tracked transparently, and escalated according to risk.

Requirements:

• Extensive cybersecurity experience, including leadership responsibility in offensive security, penetration testing, threat hunting, threat intelligence, detection engineering, or incident response.
• Proven experience building or scaling multidisciplinary security teams and programs.
• Strong technical understanding of modern cloud environments, identity systems, applications, APIs, networks, endpoints, containers, and production infrastructure.
• Demonstrated experience planning and delivering red-team operations, penetration tests, or adversary-emulation exercises.
• Practical knowledge of threat-hunting methodology, telemetry, detection logic, and investigation workflows.
• Experience producing and operationalizing strategic, operational, and tactical threat intelligence.
• Strong understanding of adversary behavior and frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
• Excellent communication and executive-presentation skills.

Benefits & Perks:

• Competitive compensation
• Career growth and learning opportunities
• Flexibility and ownership
• Collaborative and innovative culture
• Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects
• International environment and talented teams