Job Overview

The Research & Advocacy team, as part of the Office of the CTO, is committed to closing the security achievement gap by creating great teaming experiences for customers and making the most successful security technology and practices accessible for all. Our engineering team's overall goal is to build the world-class research platforms to produce security research that we ourselves would want to read and apply.

In this role, you will be responsible for inventing and sustaining Rapid7's research capabilities. This mission encompasses Project Sonar, Project Heisenberg, and the soon-to-be-released Project Doppler. The first two are the twin pillars of our internet telemetry capability, and the last is a front-end, customer-accessible portal that presents data from those projects. More broadly, we expect to support and enhance the research capabilities of teams within and without the Office of the CTO, and are likely to tackle research engineering challenges involving IoT/OT security, artificial intelligence, cloud security, and general software vulnerability research.

You will be responsible for setting strategy for software engineering in support of the aforementioned research areas, and executing against those plans in a "player-coach" capacity — you will be both a solid technical contributor to the research engineering mission as well as a capable people manager.

Distributed Team

This is a mostly remote position with occasional visits to the Austin, TX office located in downtown Austin, as well as company headquarters in downtown Boston, MA. The team normally works remotely (even in non-pandemic times) and is located primarily in the US, but with considerations for European timezones. Slack and Zoom are our way of life. Visits to the office are encouraged for deeper collaboration and cross-team communication, when possible and practical.

Essential Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and enhance internet telemetry platforms for the consumption of internal research partners

• Invent new capabilities in support of IoT, AI, cloud, and vulnerability research in partnership with Rapid7's broader research community of contributors.

• Manage an agile team of security research engineers, the relationship between research engineering and internal customers, and occasionally partner with external organizations (both private enterprise and public/government).

• Be and become reasonably conversant in the technologies that we use in Rapid7's existing research portfolio: Ruby, Python, R, Node.js, Golang, AWS (Glue, Athena, EMR/Spark), Docker, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Kubernetes, React, Django REST Framework, and Apache Airflow

Job Requirements

• Excellent communication skills

• Solid understanding of the general cybersecurity landscape and the challenges therein

• Proficiency in common software development and software engineering practices

• Strong programming skills in Ruby, Python, R, or Golang

• Experience in people management with a focus on technical learning and growth

• Relevant professional certifications and degrees are great, but absolutely not required

Rapid7 (Nasdaq: RPD) is advancing security with visibility, analytics, and automation delivered through our Insight cloud. Our solutions simplify the complex, allowing security teams to work more effectively with IT and development to reduce vulnerabilities, monitor for malicious behavior, investigate and shut down attacks, and automate routine tasks. Over 9,300 customers rely on Rapid7 technology, services, and research to improve security outcomes and securely advance their organization. For more information, visit our website, check out our blog, or follow us on LinkedIn.