Engineering Manager - {Entity Scoring Signals - Messaging Detection}

About the Role

Abnormal Security is looking for an Engineering manager to join the Message Detection - Entity Scoring Signals team. At Abnormal, we protect our customers against nefarious adversaries who are constantly evolving their techniques and tactics to outwit and undermine the traditional approaches to Security. That’s what makes our novel behavioral-based approach so…Abnormal. Abnormal has constantly been named as one of the top cybersecurity startups and our behavioral AI system has helped us win various cybersecurity accolades resulting in being trusted to protect more than 8% of the Fortune 1000 ( and ever growing ).

In a landscape where a single successful attack can lead to financial losses of millions of dollars, the Message Detection team plays the central role of building an extremely high recall Detection Engine that can operate on hundreds of millions of messages at milliseconds latency. The Message Detection team’s mission statement is to provide world-class detector efficacy to tackle changing attack landscape using a combination of generalizable and auto trained models as well as specific detectors for high value attack categories.

The Entity Scoring Signals team is spearheading the advancement of our email security engine by developing cutting-edge signals and detectors to identify cybersecurity threats. The team's innovative approach involves breaking down emails into granular components, known as entities, and developing sophisticated heuristics to assess the suspiciousness of each entity. This entity-centric approach enhances the accuracy, actionability, and explainability of threat detection.The team plays a key role in helping the engine quickly adapt to emerging attack patterns by refining and specializing entity-level heuristics and signals. These highly specific entity signals are then used by downstream systems, including heuristic and machine learning models, to continuously improve the overall detection performance.

The Engineering Manager will lead a dedicated group of software engineers focused on enhancing the email detection engine through the development of advanced entity-level heuristics and signals. They will be responsible for managing the execution of the team's roadmap and deliverables while optimizing both human and system resource utilization. The ability to effectively manage team dynamics, set strategic goals, and optimize resource utilization will be crucial in achieving key outcomes, particularly in integrating entity scores into the detection engine to amplify the team’s impact on emerging attack patterns. Additionally, the Engineering Manager will foster an environment of mentorship and performance excellence, supporting the team in navigating the fast-paced cybersecurity landscape and achieving extremely high recall in the detection decisioning system.

What you will do 

• Own the execution success of the quarterly roadmap for the Entity Signal Scoring team; engage continuously with the Tech Leads to help adjust and prioritize current roadmap items according to the team’s charter and company priorities.
• Drive processes to enable the team to deliver on projects that are set by TLs as part of the technical roadmap.
• Manage the quarterly roadmap updates, project time estimates, weekly sprint planning, day-to-day standups
• Identify risks on project delivery (technical, operational, dependency risks) and escalate to appropriate technical leads
• Able to assess progress in a metrics-oriented manner
• Own both directly customer impacting metrics and system metrics and able to work with the team to proactively identify new attacks and repair degradations:
• Drive stakeholder alignment: Proactively identify and collaborate with machine learning and infrastructure teams on interfacing and adoption of the entity scoring signals in the overall detection engine.
• Ensure project execution aligns with the company’s detection strategy and maintain continuous stakeholder communication.
• Mentor, develop, and grow the engineers on your team, ensuring they have a clear career progression and high levels of engagement.

Must Haves 

• 10+ years of overall experience in software engineering, among which 3+ years of management experience
• At least 5 years of professional, production-level experience in building and safely shipping backend heavy product features or ML adjacent systems at high velocity.
• Has led a team of engineers in building out systems and displayed the ability to define metrics of excellence and setup processes to continuously monitor and maintain high standards on metrics.
• Proven ability to translate business requirements into detailed software requirements, effectively articulating systems design to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.
• Proven experience working effectively with cross-functional teams, demonstrating the ability to collaborate with a diverse range of stakeholders.
• Ability to lead and motivate team members, setting high standards and expectations for project execution, both for themselves and their collaborators.
• Experience with hiring and retention of top talent
• A Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, Applied Sciences, Information Systems, or a closely related engineering field.

Nice to Have 

• Familiarity with cyber security industry
• Exposure to ML/AI systems 
• MS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or other related engineering field

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