Product Director- MXDR

Director, MXDR Product

LevelDirector FunctionProduct Engineering & Development - MXDR (Managed Extended Detection & Response) Experience15-20 years, including 5+ years leading a security or infrastructure product at scale

Role Summary

The Director, MXDR Product owns the MXDR product line end-to-end - strategy, roadmap, delivery, and outcomes. This person sits at the intersection of engineering, architecture, security operations, sales, and customer success, converting technical capability into a coherent product that customers trust and buy. They will partner closely with the Senior Architect (who continues to own technical architecture) while taking full ownership of product direction, delivery commitments, cross-functional alignment, and executive/customer communication.

Key Responsibilities

Product Ownership & Strategy

• Own the MXDR product roadmap end-to-end - define priorities, sequence releases, and make explicit trade-off calls between customer asks, competitive pressure, and technical debt.
• Translate market and customer signal (win/loss reviews, analyst reports, competitive intelligence, compliance requirements like FedRAMP/SOC 2) into a defensible product strategy.
• Own the business case for major initiatives - cost, timeline, staffing, and expected outcome - before they go to engineering, closing the gap between "good architecture" and "fundable roadmap."

Delivery Ownership

• Own delivery predictability: turn architecture and design work into resourced, sequenced, trackable delivery plans with realistic timelines.
• Run the cadence that keeps delivery visible - regular progress reviews, clear status reporting (RAG/roadmap-vs-actual), and early escalation of risk rather than late surprises.
• Partner with the Senior Architect and engineering leads to convert technical designs into shippable phases with clear acceptance criteria and success metrics.

Stakeholder Management & Communication

• Be the primary product point of contact for CTO, executive leadership, and key customers - comfortable presenting roadmap, risk, and trade-offs to non-technical and executive audiences.
• Manage the inevitable tension between sales commitments, customer requests, and engineering capacity - and be the one who says no, with a clear rationale, when needed.
• Build and maintain trust with cross-functional stakeholders (engineering, SOC/security operations, sales, marketing, customer success, compliance) so the product roadmap reflects real constraints from every side, not just engineering's.

Ownership & Accountability

• Take end-to-end accountability for product outcomes - not just what was designed or built, but what shipped, what customers adopted, and what moved the business forward.
• Proactively surface risk (technical, delivery, market, compliance) rather than waiting to be asked - and bring a recommended path forward, not just a problem.
• Own post-release outcomes: adoption, customer feedback, support burden, and whether the product delivered the value it was built for.

Domain & Technical Fluency

• Be fluent enough in MXDR/SOC concepts (detection engineering, threat hunting, SIEM/UEBA/ITDR, incident response workflows, MITRE ATT&CK) to have a credible technical conversation with architects, customers, and analysts - without needing to be the one designing the models.
• Understand the compliance and certification landscape relevant to security products (SOC 2, FedRAMP, ISO 27001, GDPR) well enough to factor it into roadmap decisions early, not as an afterthought.
• Expertise in building AI based SDLC using AI tools.

AI/ML, LLM, and Innovation Strategy

• GenAI & LLM Integration: Design the architectural blueprint for embedding Generative AI and LLMs (via commercial APIs like OpenAI/Anthropic or open-source models like Llama/Mistral) into our existing products to deliver next-generation customer value.
• Machine Learning Pipelines: Leverage the Python ecosystem to oversee the creation of scalable ML data pipelines, MLOps frameworks, and predictive modeling features that enhance our application's intelligent capabilities.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Architect advanced RAG systems combining Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch as a vector database) and SQL to enable high-performance, context-aware semantic search and enterprise knowledge retrieval.
• AI Security & Governance: Establish enterprise-wide compliance, data privacy (preventing PII leakage into LLMs), and ethical guardrails for AI usage, ensuring alignment with emerging global AI regulations.
• Internal AI Automation: Lead initiatives to leverage AI coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot) and automated testing tools to improve overall engineering team velocity and code quality.

Executive Technology Strategy & Enterprise Architecture

• Long-Term Technical Vision: Define and execute a 3-to-5-year technology roadmap that scales with the company’s business growth, shifting engineering from a reactive delivery unit to a proactive business driver.
• Polyglot Stack Governance: Establish modern architectural guardrails and engineering standards for our composite ecosystem-ensuring seamless, secure integration between enterprise Angular frontends, distributed Python services, and high-performance .NET Web APIs.
• Enterprise Data & Search Strategy: Architect the future state of our data layer; guide principal engineers in optimizing high-transaction SQL databases (replication, partitioning) alongside massive Elastic Stack (ELK) clusters utilized for real-time search, analytics, and observability.
• R&D and Innovation Leadership: Evaluate emerging technologies, frameworks, and AI/ML capabilities to determine their business viability, running targeted Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) to maintain market competitiveness.
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Own the design and regular testing of global Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA) strategies to guarantee maximum business continuity and strict uptime SLA compliance.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 15-20 years total experience, with a meaningful portion in product development or product leadership roles for security, infrastructure, or SaaS platforms.
• 5+ years operating at Director level or equivalent scope - owning a product line's roadmap, delivery, and business outcomes, not just a feature area.
• Demonstrated track record of taking a product from architecture/vision to shipped, adopted reality - able to speak to specific products they've owned end-to-end.
• Technical Breadth: Previous hands-on architecture experience in enterprise Microsoft environments (.NET/C#) blended with open-source ecosystems (Python, Angular).
• Strong delivery discipline: experience running structured delivery cadences (roadmaps, sprint/release tracking, RAG reporting) and holding cross-functional teams to commitments.
• Excellent communicator - comfortable presenting to CTO/executive leadership and to customers, and able to translate deep technical detail into business language and back.
• Experience working alongside (not replacing) a strong technical architect - clear sense of where product ownership ends and architecture ownership begins, and how to partner rather than compete.
• Working knowledge of security operations concepts: detection & response, threat intelligence, SIEM/XDR/UEBA, identity security, or adjacent domains.
• Compliance & Governance Alignment: Ensure all engineering processes, data handling pipelines, and architectural patterns adhere strictly to industry certifications relevant to a scaling mid-size company (SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, etc.).

Preferred

• Prior experience specifically in MXDR, MDR, SIEM, XDR, or broader security operations product lines.
• Experience navigating compliance-driven sales cycles (FedRAMP, SOC 2, ISO 27001) and their impact on roadmap and architecture decisions.
• Experience building or scaling a product function - hiring and mentoring product managers, delivery leads, or program managers.
• Familiarity with modern detection engineering concepts (behavioral analytics, ML-based detection, identity threat detection) sufficient to evaluate technical proposals critically.