Director of Engineering
Content + Source + Freshness • 11 Dec 2025 • 95% confidence
Offer value
High value score due to significant leadership opportunity, engaging work in cybersecurity, and a strong company backing.
- Leadership role in a reputable startup
- Opportunity to impact application security
- Requires substantial industry experience
Pros
- Leading high-performing teams in a tech-forward environment
- Innovative work impacting application security
- Robust startup culture with growth potential
Cons
- Requires extensive experience (15+ years)
- High expectations for both technical and leadership capabilities
- Fast-paced environment may lack work-life balance
Who it's for
Executive • On-site (Palo Alto, CA)
Good fit
- Senior engineering directors and managers
- Leaders in cybersecurity with team management experience
- Candidates keen on enhancing engineering practices
Not recommended for
- Entry-level professionals without leadership experience
- Individuals averse to a fast-paced, evolving environment
- Candidates not comfortable with full-time on-site work
Motivation fit
Key skills
About the job
About Us
Endor Labs is redefining application security for the era of AI-driven software development. Today’s software is dependency-heavy and increasingly complex, making it harder than ever to identify the risks that matter most. With AI accelerating code creation, the volume of software is exploding, intensifying this challenge. Endor Labs addresses it by generating a complete call graph of your software ecosystem, giving teams the clarity to identify, prioritize, and remediate critical risks with speed and confidence.
Trusted by companies that are one or one hundred years old, Endor Labs secures code whether it was written by humans or AI, and whether it's 40-year old C++ code or cutting edge Bazel Monorepos. Endor Labs was founded by serial entrepreneurs Varun Badhwar and Dimitri Stiliadis, and is backed by leading VC firms such as Dell Technology Capital, Lightspeed, and Sierra Ventures.
How You'll Make an Impact
As Director of Engineering, you will play a critical role in shaping the foundation of our engineering organization. You’ll partner closely with product, security-research, and executive leadership to drive technical excellence, scale our teams, and deliver customer impact. This is a highly visible role where you’ll balance strategic leadership with tactical execution, ensuring we deliver high-quality products while building a healthy, collaborative, and high-performing engineering culture.
You’ll manage and mentor engineering managers, guide technical direction across infrastructure and platform areas, and bring strong execution discipline to help us scale effectively. If you thrive in fast-paced startup environments, love working on hard technical problems, and are passionate about building secure products that developers love, we’d love to talk.Responsibilities
- Lead and grow engineering teams across UI, Platform, Infrastructure, and Services, with responsibility for both technical outcomes and team health.
- Mentor and develop engineering managers and senior ICs, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- Build organizational structures and processes that enable cohesion, velocity, and scale as we grow.
- Partner with product, design, and security leaders to align engineering strategy with business priorities.
- Drive execution on complex technical projects, ensuring timely delivery and high quality.
- Maintain a data-driven approach to decision making, measuring and improving team performance.
- Balance short-term tactical needs with long-term strategic investments in architecture, tooling, and scalability.
- Champion DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native infrastructure to increase reliability and developer velocity.
- Build and strengthen relationships with stakeholders across the company, ensuring clear communication and alignment.
- Foster a culture of innovation and ownership while keeping customer value and security at the core of decision making.
What You Bring to the Table
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including several years in engineering management roles.
- Prior experience scaling teams in a high-growth startup with deeply technical product; Series A–C experience strongly preferred.
- Proven track record of building and scaling high-performing engineering teams in multi-geo, hybrid and distributed environments.
- Deep understanding of microservices architecture, API design, and infrastructure automation.
- Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and modern infrastructure tooling
- Demonstrated ability to balance strategic planning with day-to-day execution.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align engineering with business needs.
- Strong mentorship track record, including developing engineering managers and growing senior talent.
- Experience delivering security products, developer tools, or working within the cybersecurity space is highly desirable.
- Familiarity with open-source ecosystems and community dynamics is a plus.
What Makes Us... Us
- Strive for excellence in everything we do, prioritizing quality, speed, and impactful outcomes.
- Engage in first principles thinking to debate ideas, test assumptions, and make decisions.
- Put data above opinions, seeking truth and clarity in all our endeavors.
- Embrace a culture of feedback and continuous improvement, assuming good intent in all interactions.
- Celebrate wins as a team, understanding that our collective success is intertwined with the success of our customers.
Endor Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Even if you don't fit every requirement above, we believe in the power of diverse perspectives and experiences, so we encourage all talented individuals to apply—there's no one-size-fits-all here.
