Director, Software Engineering, Detection & Response

Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, frequent, and damaging, challenging organizations to stay ahead of attackers in an increasingly complex digital landscape. Detection and Response is one of the fastest-evolving and most critical areas within cybersecurity, where real-time threat detection, rapid investigation, and automated response are essential to reducing risk and minimizing impact.

This role offers the opportunity to lead mission-critical engineering teams focused on the technical heart of Rapid7’s Detection and Response platform: Log Search (our proprietary search and indexing system), the network sensor engineering team, and our Site Reliability Engineering function for Detection & Response. Success in this role will require deep technical expertise in high-scale distributed systems, search technologies, networking, observability, and cloud-native reliability practices, combined with proven leadership experience in scaling teams, aligning engineering and product strategy, and driving operational and cultural excellence across a complex organization.

If you are passionate about building and scaling foundational systems under real-world operational pressure, and you are excited about leading global, high-performing teams through the challenges of real-time threat detection at scale, driving technical innovation, and fostering operational and organizational resilience, we would love to meet you.

About the Role:

In this role, you will:

Develop and maintain technical execution plans aligned to roadmap goals, driving high standards for delivery quality, resilience, and performance.
Lead engineering teams responsible for Log Search (Rapid7's proprietary search and indexing technology), network sensor engineering, and site reliability operations.
Drive technical excellence in search architecture, distributed systems, networking, observability, and operational tooling.
Partner closely with Product Management, UX, and Customer Success to align engineering priorities with customer needs and product vision.
Ensure scalable, cloud-native development, testing, and deployment processes that support the platform’s growth and resilience.
Invest in the growth and development of technical leadership within the team, building a strong, thriving engineering culture.
Engage with customers and internal stakeholders to gather feedback, remove friction, and drive improvements across the platform.
Champion operational excellence initiatives including system health, availability, disaster recovery, and incident management practices.
Collaborate cross-functionally to improve product quality, customer experience, and engineering scalability.

The skills you’ll bring include:

Technical Depth: Strong computer science fundamentals, particularly in areas such as high performance data processing, search, storage, data indexing, distributed systems, network protocols, telemetry, and cloud architecture.
Domain Expertise: Experience building and operating complex backend systems, large-scale data stores, network telemetry pipelines, or reliability engineering frameworks.
Leadership: Track record of growing and leading high-performing, geographically distributed technical teams across multiple disciplines.
Collaboration: Ability to work cross-functionally and influence Product, Support, Customer Success, and Strategy teams to drive alignment around customer outcomes.
Customer Focus: History of engaging directly with customers and translating feedback into product and operational improvements.
Results-Oriented: Proven ability to deliver high-quality, scalable platforms in fast-paced, continuous deployment environments.
Strategic Thinking: Strong facility for recognizing emerging trends in cloud security and detection and response, and evolving technical strategies to match.

What Else?

8+ years of engineering leadership experience, including experience managing complex platform technologies at scale.
Prior experience leading projects featuring high performance computing, search technologies, network data ingestion, or SRE teams strongly preferred.
Track record of retaining, developing, motivating, and mentoring highly effective technical teams.
Deep commitment to operational excellence, system resilience, and proactive improvement initiatives.
Ability to drive clarity, quality, and innovation across diverse engineering teams.

We know that the best ideas and solutions come from multi-dimensional teams. That’s because these teams reflect a variety of backgrounds and professional experiences. If you are excited about this role and feel your experience can make an impact, please don’t be shy - apply today.

About Rapid7

At Rapid7, we are on a mission to create a secure digital world for our customers, our industry, and our communities. We do this by embracing tenacity, passion, and collaboration to challenge what’s possible and drive extraordinary impact.

Here, we’re building a dynamic workplace where everyone can have the career experience of a lifetime. We challenge ourselves to grow to our full potential. We learn from our missteps and celebrate our victories. We come to work every day to push boundaries in cybersecurity and keep our 11,000+ global customers ahead of whatever’s next.

Join us and bring your unique experiences and perspectives to tackle some of the world’s biggest security challenges.

Director, Software Engineering

Job Description