Global Head of Platforms (DevOps)

Hello, let us introduce ourselves!

We are watchTowr, a VC-backed cyber security startup helping organisations continuously discover vulnerabilities in their Internet-facing attack surface. Cyber security veterans and technical experts, we are obsessed with building cybersecurity technology to help prevent breaches.

With experience informed by years of simulating sophisticated cyber attacks against some of the world's largest organisations, our mission is to enable organisations to continuously understand how an attacker would successfully compromise their business - with cutting-edge Attack Surface Management and Continuous Automated Red Teaming technology.

watchTowr was named within Gartner’s Emerging Tech Impact Radar report in 2023, in Gartner's Innovation Impact report for ASM in 2024, and is utilised by Fortune 500 and other large enterprises globally. Our research is well-known and respected across the cybersecurity industry, and can be found in various news outlets - while fuelling the watchTowr Platform.

We are a young, high-energy and high-performing team delivering world-class technology to help our clients prevent breaches. We are in a high and aggressive growth phase of our journey, and are excited to continue adding colleagues to join our phorce of nature.

Our vision for offensive security is continuous.

So what’s the role?

We are looking for a Head of Platforms (DevOps) Global with deep expertise in networking and building/scaling distributed systems to lead our DevOps team. The main challenge you will be helping to solve is scaling our automated scanning platform so that we can serve clients at a global level.

As part of a fast growing team, you can also expect to be involved with other DevOps/SRE-related challenges involving improving development agility and service availability.

Sounds great – what will I do?

• You will enable our cyber and engineering teams to deliver features that drive our market leadership - understand business priorities and translate them into technical requirements, ensuring alignment between strategic goals and project execution
• You get to scale a legitimate botnet - architect, scale, and optimise our distributed scanning infrastructure to reliably serve a global audience
• You will make DevOps great again - be relentless in improving the four key DevOps metrics:
  • Improve the deployment frequency of our platform
  • Reduce the lead time for changes to get from development into production
  • Reduce the number of deployment failures that lead to unscheduled downtime
  • Reduce the time taken for the product to recover from a production failure
• You will tackle scaling problems in an engineering-focused team
  • How could we scale our global network in an efficient manner?
  • How can we improve the processing throughput of data and workflow pipelines?
  • How could we improve the availability of our systems in general?

Sounds perfect to me, what’re the details?

Minimum Experience

• This is a senior level role requiring eight or more years experience:
  • Leading and scaling agile, high-performance platform teams in a fast-paced environment
  • Designing and implementing scalable distributed networks with high throughput
  • Handling cloud infrastructure setup and maintenance
  • Working in cross-functional teams delivering software using Agile methodologies
• Good understanding of OSI layer 3/above networking concepts
• Been responsible for managing and upgrading systems in production
• Been part of an organisation that has scaled a system from a single region to a global level

Technologies

Here are the technologies we use. Ideally, you’d have working experience with:

• Cloud service providers: AWS, Azure, GitHub
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Terraform
• Application platform: Kubernetes (AWS EKS), Helm, Docker, Docker Compose
• Observability: Elastic-Fluent-Kibana (EFK) stack, Prometheus, Jaegar/OpenTelemetry, Grafana
• Persistence: PostgreSQL (RDS), MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka
• Delivery pipelines: GitHub Actions, AWS CodeBuild
• Workflow orchestration: Airflow, Kubernetes
• Software runtimes: Python, Node.js, Go

Our Experience

When you join us, you can expect (ok, we kinda expect this from you too):

• A highly motivated team that obsesses over our shared mission
• To be part of a team of outcome-focused problem-solvers
• An environment of autonomy and creativity to support you to deliver the best work of your life
• A culture of continuous improvement in the form of learning and growth

What’s in it for me?

• Competitive compensation - we believe that hard work, skills and ambition should be fairly compensated.
• Meaningful role in a company - You will be a key and early contributor to a fast-growing cyber security business that helps protect some of the world's largest enterprises.
• The best tools and powerful kit - we enable you with the tools to effectively fulfil your role.
• Endless opportunities – we are in a high-growth phase of our journey, and plan to promote from within as we scale.
• Work with cyber security experts – we are solving cutting-edge industry-wide cyber security challenges with some of the world’s most advanced organisations.
• Work hard, play hard - we work hard together, but we also have fun together. On Fridays, we regularly turn on the speakers, open the beer fridge, and prepare for the weekend.

Note: This role is a UK-based remote role. Unfortunately, we cannot sponsor visas for candidates outside of the UK.