[Hiring] Head of Security Engineering & Malware Research @Alex Staff Agency

Role Description

A strategic and technical Head of Malware Research & Engineering to lead Cloud Detection & Analysis Department. You will oversee three specialized teams (20+ people) responsible for the heart of security ecosystem: the malware detection engine, cloud-based analysis infrastructure, and the end-to-end threat intelligence lifecycle.

This is a high-impact leadership role that combines deep architectural oversight of distributed systems with the management of elite security researchers and software engineers.

Mission

• Own the end-to-end pipeline - from ingestion of 10M+ unique daily samples to real-time verdict delivery on global server fleets.
• Define the roadmap for malware analysis, automated signature generation, and ML-driven classification.
• Guide decisions on massive-scale data processing using Airflow, Kafka, ClickHouse, and modern Python/Rust stacks.
• Drive the integration of LLMs and transformers for automated code analysis and malware rule creation.
• Mentor and scale a multi-disciplinary department across three global teams, fostering a culture of operational excellence and rapid incident response.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading security labs or product departments, successfully managing the bridge between pure research and production-ready security features.
• 8+ years in software engineering with 3+ years in a "manager of managers" or multi-team leadership role.
• Deep credibility in static/dynamic analysis, heuristic engines, and the lifecycle of false-positive/negative remediation.
• Professional experience with distributed data engineering (Airflow, message queues like Kafka/RabbitMQ) and high-volume storage/DB architectures (Ceph, ClickHouse, MongoDB).
• Experience managing CI/CD for security products where release quality is critical to maintaining global infrastructure uptime.
• Comfortable working in a 100% remote, geographically distributed environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expertise in web infrastructure security (securing large-scale web server environments and multi-tenant platforms).
• Experience applying Machine Learning (Transformers, LLMs) to code analysis and threat detection.
• Deep knowledge of PHP internals or dynamic analysis via sandboxing/emulation.
• Practical experience with GCP (Secret Manager, Cloud Storage) in a security context.

Core Stack

• Languages: Python (Primary), Rust, PHP, SQL.
• Data & Orchestration: Apache Airflow, Kafka, ClickHouse, MongoDB, Redis.
• Infrastructure: Bare metal & GCP, Docker, Ceph/S3-compatible storage.
• Tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Grafana, Sentry.

Salary

Competitive compensation package based on seniority and expertise, discussed individually with successful candidates.

Work Mode

• 100% Remote (Global).
• Timezone: Primarily CET ±.