Head of Threat Research

Hello, let us introduce ourselves!

We are watchTowr, a global cybersecurity startup redefining the External Attack Surface Management space with our Continuous Automated Red Teaming technology, the watchTowr Platform.

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 banks, insurers and governments - our mission is to enable organisations to continuously understand how an attacker would successfully compromise their business, data and environment.

watchTowr was named within Gartner’s Emerging Tech Impact Radar report in 2023, and is utilised by Fortune 500 and other large enterprises globally. Our vulnerability and exploit development 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 have raised a total of $29M USD to date to build our vision, and are in a high and aggressive growth phase of our journey. We are excited to continue adding colleagues to join our force of nature.

Our vision for offensive security is continuous.

 

But what’s the role?

We are looking for an experienced and veteran colleague to join watchTowr as our Head of Threat Research, in our bid to help secure attack surfaces at scale and beat in-the-wild attacker activity.

This is the opportunity to work alongside an existing incredibly capable and world-class offensive security team in watchTowr Labs and build a world-class Threat Research capability inside watchTowr - while having a significant impact on the security posture of the organisations we work with and the wider industry.

We are not focused on geopolitical or industry-focused threat intelligence but are obsessed with ensuring our technology constantly reflects real-world attackers. We want to lead the industry in answering the question, "What are attackers doing today? How can we capture their tactics and techniques to build into our technology and determine if our clients are affected (regardless of country or industry)?”

Our public vulnerability research can be found at https://labs.watchtowr.com

 

Sounds great – what will I do?

• You will establish and build the global watchTowr Threat Research capability (name TBD) as a world-class capability.
• You’ll perform cutting-edge offensive security threat research to understand in-the-wild attacker behaviour and novel tactics and techniques. Our research has one goal—keeping our clients secure.
• Your research and analysis will have internal audiences - to fuel our technology and continue to ensure our capabilities reflect real-world attacker behaviour - and external audiences in the form of white papers, insights and presentations.
• You will use our technology to understand the impact of your and your team’s research at scale against all of our clients. Our message is very clear: Never do anything twice. Let our technology provide the harness and continuous framework you need.
• We encourage and expect you to submit your work to conferences around the world—we will support you in making it happen!

 

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

Core Skills

• You have 8+ years of hands-on experience in vulnerability, exploit, and in-the-wild actor-focused threat research roles.
• You have experience leading and building global Threat Research teams.
• You understand the tactics and techniques used by real-world threat actors in the wild in the context of their usage.
• Technical skills to build and deploy systems to observe, capture and analyse in-the-wild threat actor behaviour.
• A demonstrable history of analysing and publishing intelligence on in-the-wild threat actor behaviour - via advisories, blog posts and conference presentations - targeting enterprises.
• You can comfortably turn your highly-complex, sophisticated analysis and understanding of attacker behaviours into externally facing white papers, and insights - and create technical TTPs for ingestion by our engineering and watchTowr Labs teams.
• You are comfortable writing, producing and publishing world-class content.
• Driven by your own passion and initiative - you understand the mission, and don’t need someone to guide you.

Our Experience

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

• A highly motivated, experienced, offensive cyber 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.

 

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