Senior Engineering Manager - Software Engineering & Security Research
Bforeai · Contract · Posted 3w ago
BforeAI is an innovative and rapidly expanding scale-up dedicated to deterring cybercrime through cutting-edge predictive and preemptive technologies. We've harnessed the power of prescriptive AI to revolutionize the way we tackle cyber threats, stopping attacks before they launch.
Named by Gartner® in 48 reports over the last 4 years and recognized as a Tech Innovator for Preemptive Cybersecurity in the 2025 Emerging Tech report, BforeAI is the industry’s fastest, most accurate solution for automated protection against online fraud.
Join us in the fight for a safer cyberspace!
🚀 Why it’s great to work here
We are a location-independent company with a fully distributed team. We believe diversity of experience, background, and thinking leads to stronger teams and a better product. We value autonomy, intellectual honesty, practical decision-making, and engineers who take ownership of outcomes rather than waiting for perfectly defined tasks.
We offer an intellectually stimulating company environment and you’ll be working with a bright, dedicated team from across the globe. Additionally, we offer flexible time off, sick days, all public holidays, and stock options.
✨ What’s cool about this job
You will work with a dedicated global team on technically difficult problems involving cybersecurity, distributed systems, data engineering, machine learning, and SaaS product development. You will help turn raw and rapidly changing threat information into dependable product behavior. That means writing production services, defining clear boundaries between components, handling failure deliberately, and making results understandable to operators and customers.
📣 What you’ll be doing
You will act as a player-coach manager responsible for Software Engineering and Security Research Engineering (Platform Engineering reports to a separate manager), including hiring, performance, technical direction, and delivery. You will lead the team turning threat research and shared data capabilities into production detections and customer features. You'll work directly with engineers and researchers on validation, design decisions, and production problems.
As the team grows, more time will shift toward coaching, hiring, delegation, and coordination. Direct technical involvement will continue through design reviews, difficult problems, and production issues, with greater implementation ownership delegated to engineers and technical leads.
- Manage Software Engineering and Security Research Engineering, including hiring, onboarding, performance, career development, and delivery.
- Own the process from research hypothesis through evaluation, implementation, release, and ongoing detection quality.
- Set the research agenda with Product and engineering leadership, prioritizing questions based on customer needs, coverage gaps, and available data capabilities.
- Work with researchers to validate evidence, assess coverage gaps, and determine production readiness.
- Work with engineers on services, APIs, detection integration, testing, and production troubleshooting.
- Establish detection evaluation and regression testing; track false positives, missed threats, coverage, and production behavior.
- Set research objectives and evaluation criteria; establish implementation commitments as findings are validated. Plan delivery with Product using defined interfaces, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and capacity.
- Coordinate data access, interfaces, and reliability with Platform Engineering; enforce customer-data access boundaries.
- Guide product and detection design to reuse shared evidence, relationships, and history across customer workflows; evaluate how data quality and freshness affect results.
- Develop technical leads and independent ownership; adapt team structure and working practices as the team grows.
- Resolve customer escalations and production issues requiring engineering and research expertise; address recurring causes.
- Support AI-assisted engineering and research with evaluation and review of results.
💥 You’ll be a great fit if
- Experience leading development of SaaS products and/or products built on shared data platforms.
- Experience directly managing threat intelligence, threat research, detection engineering, or vulnerability research teams whose work contributed to a production security product.
- Experience leading software engineering delivery and managing technical contributors across engineering and research disciplines.
- Evidence of translating research findings into shipped capabilities, including validation, testing, deployment, and ongoing quality improvement.
- Technical depth to evaluate approaches, challenge assumptions, and resolve problems across software engineering and threat research, including architecture, detection methods, and data quality.
- Experience owning hiring, performance management, and career development for a multidisciplinary team.
- Ability to manage research uncertainty while maintaining clear delivery expectations and balancing exploration with customer commitments.
- Ability to document decisions and coordinate delivery across engineering and research in a remote team.
- Willingness to learn and apply AI-augmented engineering and research practices.
You do not need every item below, but relevant experience may help you have an immediate impact:
- Experience with external threat intelligence, phishing, malicious domains, impersonation, or adversarial infrastructure analysis.
- Experience developing technical leads and expanding delegated ownership as a team grows.
- A software development background, particularly with Python or Go.
- Experience with cloud services, event-driven systems, graph-based analysis, or evaluating ML-assisted detections.
- Experience using AI development or research tools with measurable quality controls.
💻 Our environment
Our Azure-based environment includes Go and Python services, Event Hubs and Kafka-compatible messaging, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Data Explorer, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Redis, Databricks for appropriate analytics and machine-learning workloads, Kubernetes, and Azure-managed compute services.
Experience with every component is not required. We care more about whether you understand the engineering principles underneath these technologies, can become productive in an unfamiliar environment, and can choose the appropriate combination of managed services and custom software.
At BforeAI, we're dedicated to building a diverse workplace based on merit, work ethics, and character, and we believe everyone deserves a fair shot at success! If you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification, we hope you’ll still consider applying!
We use an Employee of Record service to facilitate seamless global hiring processes and offer benefits tailored to the country where you will be working! For countries not supported by our EOR partner, talk to us about being a contractor. In all cases, this position is not eligible for visa sponsorship so you will need to be authorized to work in the country you’re based in. We will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities as needed.
💡 Want to know more about BforeAI?
New Zealand