Security Research Team Lead

Description

As Security Research Team Lead at Nagomi, you will lead the team turning security research and enterprise security data into actionable insights and product capabilities. You will combine people management with hands-on technical leadership, helping customers understand their exposure and get more value from their security tools.

We’re looking for a leader with a strong background in cybersecurity research, deep understanding of enterprise security tools, and a data-driven approach to solving problems. You should be equally comfortable mentoring researchers, shaping a research roadmap, and joining customer calls to explain findings and understand real-world challenges.

What You'll Do

• Lead and Develop the Team: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of security researchers. Set clear goals, provide technical guidance and feedback, and build a culture of rigor, curiosity, and ownership.
• Own the Research Roadmap: Define and prioritize research initiatives in partnership with product and engineering. Balance customer needs, emerging threats, and strategic opportunities, taking projects from initial investigation through production delivery.
• Drive Security Tool Research: Lead deep research into enterprise security platforms, including EDR, SIEM, firewalls, IAM, and vulnerability management tools. Assess configurations, policies, coverage, and defensive capabilities to identify gaps and improve security effectiveness.
• Engage Directly with Customers: Lead technical customer discussions, explain findings clearly, investigate complex questions, and turn feedback into research and product improvements.
• Turn Data into Security Insights: Guide how the team collects, models, correlates, and validates security data. Translate fragmented telemetry and configuration data into reliable assessments, prioritized findings, and actionable recommendations.
• Shape Integrations and Product Capabilities: Own the research requirements and security logic behind integrations, security control assessments, and exposure prioritization. Work closely with engineering to ensure research translates into accurate, scalable product features.
• Set Research Quality Standards: Establish methods for validating findings, testing assumptions, and measuring accuracy. Ensure conclusions are supported by evidence and recommendations account for customer context and operational constraints.
• Guide AI-Powered Research and Workflows: Shape the security knowledge, reasoning logic, and evaluation methods behind Nagomi’s AI-powered capabilities, ensuring outputs are accurate, explainable, and useful.
• Partner Across Nagomi: Collaborate with product, engineering, data, and customer-facing teams to align priorities, resolve technical challenges, and deliver meaningful customer outcomes.

Requirements

• Leadership Experience: Proven experience managing security researchers or a closely related technical team, including mentoring, performance management, and project delivery.
• Cybersecurity Research Expertise: 6+ years of relevant hands-on experience in cybersecurity research, security control assessment, detection engineering, exposure management, or related fields.
• Deep Security Tool Knowledge: Strong understanding of enterprise security platforms, their APIs, configuration models, policies, and telemetry. Ability to evaluate what a tool can protect against, how it is deployed, and where gaps remain.
• Data-Driven Research Skills: Experience working with complex security datasets, defining data models, and correlating information across sources. Comfortable using Python, SQL, or similar tools to investigate data, test hypotheses, and validate research at scale.
• Technical Judgment: Ability to challenge assumptions, review research methods and results, and guide the team through ambiguous problems while staying close to the technical details.
• Product and Delivery Mindset: A track record of turning research into practical capabilities, setting priorities, managing dependencies, and delivering projects end-to-end.
• Customer-Facing Communication: Ability to lead technical customer calls, ask thoughtful questions, and explain complex findings to both security practitioners and non-specialist stakeholders.
• Broad Security Foundations: Understanding of attacker techniques, enterprise environments, cloud and identity security, and how security controls work together to reduce risk.

It’s nice if you have

• Hands-on red teaming, penetration testing, adversary emulation, or attack-path analysis experience.
• Experience building or evaluating AI-powered security capabilities and agentic workflows.
• Experience with Automated Security Control Assessments (ASCA), exposure management, or security control validation.
• Experience collaborating with data engineering or data science teams on security data pipelines and analytics.
• Experience hiring and scaling a research team.
• Published research, open-source contributions, CVEs, or conference presentations.