Director of Security Engineering

Larger enterprise prospects keep asking Cinderforge for additional compliance certifications before they will sign, and this director role exists to lead the security organization through getting them. Two specific certifications are already named in signed contracts with penalty clauses tied to their delivery dates, giving this role a harder deadline than security leadership usually carries.

The role covers setting a multi-year security roadmap across platform hardening, customer-facing security features and the compliance processes that currently lag behind what the sales pipeline requires, managing two engineering managers, and serving as the executive point of contact during any serious security incident. The organization today runs roughly fifteen engineers across application security, detection and compliance, and this director is expected to make the case for further growth backed by a credible roadmap.

Required: a strong track record leading a security organization through a compliance-driven growth phase, with genuine depth in security architecture, cloud security and incident response rather than a purely managerial background. Cinderforge scopes this seat by the organization it runs — roughly fifteen engineers across three disciplines — rather than by a year count. Prior experience in exactly this industry is not required; compliance-driven security leadership experience elsewhere transfers directly.

Regular travel to Cinderforge's Austin headquarters comes with this hybrid role, expected even on weeks the broader security team works from home. You would report to the CTO, manage two engineering managers directly, and represent security at the executive level whenever a serious incident or a customer's compliance review requires it.