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VP of Engineering

Remote

About Us

Stairwell empowers organizations with evasion-proof solutions. Stairwell’s pioneering platform provides security teams with automated threat detection and response tools that amplify their operations. Acknowledged by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies of 2023, Fortune 500 companies utilize Stairwell's platform. Stairwell’s team, a collective of security industry veterans and engineers from Google, is backed by renowned investors like Sequoia Capital, Accel, and Gradient Ventures. For more information, visit www.stairwell.com or connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

VP of Engineering

We’re building the most advanced system for malware discovery and analysis on the planet - not as a nice-to-have feature, but as a new foundation for security. We process trillions of DNS resolutions. Analyze billions of files continuously. Preserve every artifact, forever, and re-analyze them constantly with detection logic and intelligence that gets smarter by the hour.

Our architecture is complex. Our mission is clear. We need a VP of Engineering who can lead both.

This is a role for someone who can operate technically at depth - designing the next phase of a distributed system that processes and analyzes petabytes of data every day - while also building the org, practices, and culture that make execution consistent and scalable. Not just shipping fast, but shipping sustainably. Not just building systems - building a team that can evolve them for years.

What You’ll Own

Product & Platform Execution

  • Drive execution across core platform, infrastructure, detection pipelines, artifact ingestion, and customer integrations.
  • Translate product direction and threat research into system architecture, engineering plans, and shipped software.
  • Balance speed with quality. Prioritize ruthlessly. Deliver predictably.

Org Design & Leadership

  • Build a high-performance engineering org - sharp, low-ego engineers who care about the work and the mission.
  • Hire experienced, accountable engineers who thrive with autonomy. Set high standards early, make expectations explicit, and raise the bar as the company grows.
  • Create a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous improvement - where everyone knows what good looks like.

Collaboration & Strategic Impact

  • Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the CTO to align technical vision with product and company strategy.
  • Partner with Threat Research to turn detection insights into capabilities.
  • Partner with Sales Engineering and Customer Success to ensure we’re building solutions that matter in the field.
  • Represent engineering in executive discussions. Drive alignment across teams.

Technical Leadership

  • Define and evolve the system architecture to support petabyte-scale data, real-time analysis, and continuous reprocessing of historical artifacts.
  • Champion engineering quality: secure-by-default design, strong review culture, automated testing, and reliable releases.

What You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ in senior leadership roles (VP, Director, or similar).
  • Proven track record building and scaling complex distributed systems - including architecture, execution, and operations.
  • Experience leading cross-functional teams across backend, platform, and infrastructure - with a strong bias for shipping.
  • Deep familiarity with cloud-native systems (ideally GCP), Go, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Experience integrating AI/ML into product features or infrastructure — ideally in applied contexts like detection logic, enrichment, anomaly analysis, or automation workflows.
  • Strong grasp of how to apply AI tools to modern software development — from internal copilots to code quality checks, testing, and build acceleration.
  • Demonstrated ability to set and enforce high standards across hiring, code quality, technical design, and delivery.
  • Strong communication and planning skills - with a willingness to roll up your sleeves when needed.

Preferred Experience

  • Background in security infrastructure, malware analysis, threat detection, or high-scale telemetry systems.
  • Experience with large-scale data pipelines, ETL, or continuous scanning infrastructure.
  • Familiarity with detection logic (YARA, Sigma), binary analysis, or reverse engineering workflows.
  • Track record of building customer-facing APIs or developer platforms with high adoption and integration complexity.
  • Comfortable balancing short-term wins with long-term architectural decisions - and communicating those tradeoffs clearly.

Team & Culture

  • You’ll lead a high-performance engineering team where excellence is the default. We value execution, curiosity, and accountability - and we hold ourselves to a high bar.
  • You’ll be responsible for attracting, growing, and retaining engineers who thrive on hard problems and real ownership - and setting the tone for a culture that expects consistent output, continuous growth, and unblocked collaboration.
  • We believe high performance is a team sport. No heroes, no passengers. Just aligned, sharp people working together at pace.
  • We’re building a team of fully-formed adults who can move fast, think clearly, and deliver together.

Why Stairwell

  • You’ll help lead the engineering future of a company solving one of the hardest and most important problems in security.
  • You’ll work with a small, senior team of builders from Chronicle, Google, CrowdStrike, and other industry-defining orgs.
  • You’ll be part of a company that values depth over buzzwords, impact over activity, and truth over ego.
  • You’ll shape what comes next and build the infrastructure others will copy years from now.

If you want to build a high-functioning team that ships ambitious systems and outpaces adversaries, this is the role.

If you’re looking for process management, incremental iteration, or a place to hide behind layers - this isn’t it.

Stairwell is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We consider all individuals seeking employment, regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression or military or Veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with federal, state and local law.

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