Head of Data Engineering

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 an ambitious Head of Data Engineering with solid prior experience to join us, and help our clients navigate and make sense of highly critical information that they will have access to, in our mission of helping organisations understand how they could be hacked - in real-time.

Sounds great – what will I do?

• You will lead and mentor the data engineering team
• You will play a key leadership role in designing, developing, and maintaining the data infrastructure that powers our cybersecurity platform, which is used to identify vulnerabilities in large enterprises at scale
• Ensure strong cross-functional communication by collaborating closely with product, front-end, cybersecurity, and operations teams to align data initiatives with business objectives and ensure data solutions meet organizational needs
• Drive innovation in solving complex data engineering challenges, continuously improving how we handle, process, and visualize vast amounts of data?
• Architect scalable, data-driven solutions by building and optimizing microservices, ensuring performance and reliability at enterprise scale
• You must be hands on - a this stage in our journey we need leaders who are willing to "get their hands dirty"

Sounds perfect to me, what specifics are you looking for?

Technologies

• Backend: FastAPI, Airflow
• Database: MySQL, MongoDB
• Message Queues: Kafka, RabbitMQ

Ideal Experience

Ideally, you should have 8 or more years of experience:

• You should be an experienced people manager of tech teams, ideally having led teams in multiple countries.
• You should have solid experience of scaling teams globally and planning hiring to build capabilities, as well as closing existing capability gaps
• Leading the design, development, and maintenance of mission-critical, data-driven microservices and distributed systems
• Managing and optimizing data across both relational and non-relational database management systems, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability
• Writing clean, maintainable, and testable code, with deep familiarity in various testing strategies and best practices for large-scale systems
• Architecting complex systems using patterns such as event-sourcing, CQRS, and other techniques to handle high data throughput and scalability

Bonus Experience

It’ll also be awesome if you:

• Have experience working with significant amounts of data and handling ‘big data’ for security analysis
• Have experience in platform engineering work
• Have worked in an Agile environment with a strong DevOps culture

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.