Description
We are seeking a hands-on Director of Cybersecurity AI Product Development to build and lead a newly formed product engineering team focused on developing AI agent products for cybersecurity use cases.
This is a technical leadership role for an AI-native, security-minded product engineering leader who can both manage a high-performing team and personally contribute as a lead engineer / architect. The role is expected to be approximately 50% hands-on individual contribution and 50% people management.
The successful candidate will be responsible for hiring and leading a new team of approximately six product engineers, AI engineers, security engineers, and solution-oriented technical specialists. The team will design, build, and scale cybersecurity AI agent products that help customers detect, investigate, prioritize, and respond to cyber threats.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build and Lead a New High-Performance Team:
+ Hire, onboard, and lead a new team of approximately six engineers and technical specialists within the first three months. + Define team structure, roles, operating model, engineering rituals, and delivery cadence. + Coach engineers on technical excellence, secure development, AI-native engineering practices, and product-minded execution. + Create a high-accountability, high-trust culture focused on shipping reliable, secure, and measurable product outcomes. + Set performance expectations, provide feedback, conduct reviews, and support career development.
- Lead Hands-On Product and Engineering Development:
+ Personally contribute to product architecture, system design, code review, prototyping, and production implementation. + Be able to function as a lead engineer / principal architect for critical components of the cybersecurity AI agent platform. + Review and approve technical designs, architecture decisions, code changes, and security-sensitive implementations. + Develop and maintain high engineering standards across code quality, observability, scalability, testability, and security. + Partner with product, design, sales engineering, customer success, and security teams to translate real-world customer problems into scalable technical solutions. + Drive proof-of-concept development, MVP delivery, production hardening, and continuous product iteration.
- Deliver Scalable, Production-Grade Solutions:
+ Lead the delivery of scalable, reliable, and maintainable cybersecurity AI products. + Define technical roadmaps aligned with customer needs, market opportunities, and business priorities. + Drive end-to-end delivery across discovery, design, prototyping, implementation, testing, release, monitoring, and iteration. + Establish metrics for product quality, model performance, agent reliability, security effectiveness, customer adoption, and operational impact. + Ensure systems are designed for high availability, observability, resilience, and enterprise-grade deployment. + Collaborate with stakeholders to support customer pilots, production deployments, technical demos, and executive-level product discussions. + Work with other product partners at Visa to drive the commercialization of internally developed AI security products.
- Drive AI-Native Transformation and Automation:
+ Demonstrate daily, practical use of AI tools to improve personal productivity, team velocity, software delivery, product design, documentation, testing, and operational efficiency. + Establish AI-native engineering practices across the team, including AI-assisted coding, automated testing, documentation generation, threat modeling, security review support, and product analytics. + Identify gaps, inefficiencies, and repetitive workflows, then solve them through automation, AI agents, tooling, or process redesign. + Build internal accelerators, developer tools, evaluation frameworks, and reusable AI components. + Promote a culture of experimentation, rapid learning, and measurable productivity gains through AI.
Qualifications:
- Advanced degree in Computer Science or other related fields
- 10+ years of experience in AI research, software engineering, security engineering, AI product engineering, solution engineering, or related technical roles.
- 3+ years of experience managing high-performing technical teams, preferably in product development, cybersecurity, AI/ML, cloud infrastructure, or enterprise software.
- Proven ability to hire, lead, coach, and retain strong engineering talent.
- Ability to operate as both a hands-on technical contributor and a people manager.
- Demonstrated experience leading teams through ambiguity, rapid change, and high technical complexity.
- Deep hands-on experience with modern AI technologies, especially agentic AI systems.
- Practical understanding of:
+ LLM application architecture + Agent planning and reasoning loops + Structured memory + Context management + Retrieval-augmented generation + Tool calling and function orchestration + Knowledge management + AI evaluation frameworks + Guardrails and safety controls + Prompt injection and AI-specific security risks
- Knowledge of common threats and exploits.
- Strong hands-on experience building modern software systems.