As our first security hire in Bengaluru, you will be the foundational cornerstone of our security presence in India. This role is a unique hybrid, blending deep technical execution with an explicit, high-growth leadership trajectory. You will start as an elite individual contributor establishing local capabilities across product security and security operations (SecOps).
You are fully expected to hire, build out, and directly manage a world-class, multi-disciplinary security engineering team at this location. A heavy, non-negotiable emphasis of this role is the aggressive implementation and orchestration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate, optimize, and supercharge both our SecOps detection pipelines and product security guardrails globally.
The Impact You Bring to Cognite: You will bridge the gap between application security and infrastructure defense, driving operational excellence, architectural innovation, and team expansion across several core pillars:
The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:
Core Security Engineering and Automation:
- AI-Driven SecOps: Design, test, and deploy automated detection logic and incident playbooks powered by AI agents to dramatically reduce alert fatigue and speed up response times. Integrate AI into SIEM/SOAR data pipelines to identify anomalous behavior and emerging risks across large multi-cloud datasets.
- AI-Accelerated Product Security: Implement automated code analysis and scanning (SAST/SCA) within CI/CD pipelines, leveraging AI-assisted remediation to give developers "how-to-fix" guidance instantly. Build proprietary security automation ("guardrails") that empowers software squads to build secure-by-design software at speed.
- Threat Modelling and Hardening: Lead feature-level threat models for high-stakes software projects and actively harden cloud-native environments (AWS/GCP/Azure) and identity management systems.
Technical Leadership and Team Building:
- Act as the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for regional security initiatives, navigating technical hurdles early and making evidence-based decisions.
- Champion the "Security Champions" program locally, conducting developer security workshops and fostering a high-trust, decentralized execution culture.
- Own the long-term hiring, mentoring, and performance strategy for the Bengaluru security hub, expanding our regional capabilities in lockstep with global organizational goals.
- Transition strategic security initiatives from "build and operate" phases into stabilized, long-term regional ownership structures.
Requirements:
- You do not need to tick every single box, but we expect a mature mix of technical execution, visionary engineering, and emerging leadership potential:
- AI Expertise: Demonstrated, hands-on experience leveraging LLMs, AI agents, or machine learning models to automate security tasks, orchestrate response flows, or parse complex threat telemetry.
- Product Security Domain: Solid understanding of secure SDLC practices, vulnerability triage, and application scanners (SAST, DAST, and SCA tools like CodeQL and OWASP ZAP).
- SecOps Domain: Proven experience in threat hunting, incident response management under pressure, and writing detection rules-as-code within modern SIEM/SOAR systems.
- Engineering and Code Proficiency: Strong script and tool development capabilities using Python, Go, or PowerShell, coupled with an automated DevOps mindset (CI/CD tools, Terraform, APIs).
- Leadership Vector: Clear capability and ambition to step up, scale, and manage a team, including distinct verbal/written communication, stakeholder management, and a high degree of empathy for code creators.
- Continuous-Improvement Mindset: A continuous desire to learn and treat every single alert, incident, or system hurdle as a metric-driven data point to make global defenses stronger.
- 10+ years of preferred technical skills or experience.

