Head of Research
About this role
Big Ideas. Real People.
At Orca, in the right environment and with the right team, talent has no boundaries. This team spirit, together with our drive to always aim high, has quickly earned us unicorn status and turned us into a global cloud security innovation leader. So if you’re ready to join an amazing team of people who inspire each other every day, now is the time to find your place in our pod.
We’re looking for driven and talented people like you to join our team and our mission to change the future of cloud security. Ready to dive in and swim with our pod?
Highlights
- High-growth: Over the past Seven years, we’ve consistently achieved milestones that take other companies a decade or more. During this time, we’ve significantly grown our employee base, expanded our customer reach, and rapidly advanced our product capabilities.
- Disruptive innovation: Our founders saw that traditional security didn’t work for the cloud, so they set out to carve a new path. We’re relentless pioneers who invented agentless technology and continue to be the most comprehensive and innovative cloud security company.
- Well-capitalized: With a valuation of $1.8 billion, Orca is a cybersecurity unicorn dominating the cloud security space. We’re backed by an impressive team of investors such as Capital G, ICONIQ, GGV, and SVCI, a syndicate of CISOs who invest their own money after conducting their due diligence.
- Respectful and transparent culture: Our executives pride themselves on being accessible to everyone and believe in sharing knowledge with the employees. Each employee has a place in shaping the future of our industry.
About the role
As the Head of Research, you will lead Orca Security’s threat-research, security-innovation, and vulnerability-discovery efforts. You will define the strategy for how we uncover threats, identify novel attack vectors, influence product direction, and contribute thought leadership to the cybersecurity community. You will manage and grow a team of world-class researchers, work closely with product, engineering and go-to-market teams, and ensure our research remains cutting-edge, rigorous and impactful. This role emphasizes strong people leadership and cross-functional execution, alongside technical depth and hands-on research judgment.
What you'll do
- Develop, own and evolve the research strategy by defining high value focus areas (for example misconfigurations, identity threats, workload vulnerabilities, and emerging attack techniques), and ensure alignment with Orca’s product roadmap and business objectives.
- Lead, coach, and mentor a multidisciplinary research team (researchers, threat analysts, and engineers).
- Build a healthy, high-performing org, including hiring, onboarding, and performance management.
- Partner closely with product and engineering leadership to turn research insights into concrete roadmap items, detection logic, and customer value.
- Drive discovery of new vulnerabilities, attack techniques, or adversary behaviors across cloud and modern infrastructure environments (for example containers, serverless, data stores, IAM).
- Define metrics for research impact (for example vulnerabilities discovered, time to validate and operationalize new findings, research-driven product improvements, external reach).
- Establish and maintain external partnerships (industry peers, academic groups, independent researchers) to expand Orca’s capabilities and pipeline.
- Publish and present research findings (blog posts, white papers, conference talks).
- Lead vulnerability disclosure and responsible communications.
- Ensure the research function has the right infrastructure and processes (tooling, sandboxes, repeatable experimentation, documentation standards).
- Stay current with the threat landscape, emerging technologies, attacker tradecraft, and relevant compliance or regulatory shifts.
About you
- 7+ years of experience in security research, threat intelligence, vulnerability discovery, offensive security, or closely related roles.
- Proven people management experience (mandatory), including hiring, mentoring, and growing high-performing teams.
- Demonstrated ability to set a research vision, prioritize effectively, and execute through others in a cross-functional environment.
- Strong research fundamentals: designing experiments, validating hypotheses, and turning ambiguous signals into clear findings and recommendations.
- Excellent stakeholder management and partnership skills, including the ability to collaborate deeply with engineering and product teams.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to varied audiences.
- Ability to operate hands-on when needed (for example to review technical work, guide investigations, or unblock the team).
- Solid coding fluency and automation mindset (languages and stack flexible, Python/Go helpful).
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