Head of PSC Engineering

Department: Product Security Concierge (PSC)

Reports to: Chief Security Officer

Team: Field-deployed product security solution engineers across firmware and binary analysis, penetration testing, platform support and integration, and managed-service delivery

Role type: Manager and team leader first. About ~20 to 25 percent of your time may be hands-on technical work.

Location: Remote, United States or Canada. No relocation required.

Travel: Occasional. Customer executive reviews, on-site engagements, conferences, and team gatherings.

Compensation: 250-300k, bonus, equity, and full benefits.

About the Role

Connected products run the world: vehicles, medical devices, industrial systems, critical infrastructure — and securing them is one of the hardest engineering problems there is. At Finite State, PSC Engineers are the technical owners of that problem for our customers: engineers who win trust by building and shipping, from the field.

The Head of PSC Engineering leads that team. You hire, develop, and run the engineers who each own the technical relationship with a portfolio of customer accounts and deliver our services, from penetration tests and firmware analysis to PSIRT-as-a-Service (PSIRTaaS) and Standards and Regulations Compliance-as-a-Service, on our Product Security OS platform.

This is a manager-first role. About ~20 to 25 percent of your time is hands-on technical work: contested findings, high-stakes deep technical engagements, and final review of deliverables before they reach a customer. The rest is leadership: people, capacity, quality, and the operating model that lets a small team, working with AI agents, deliver what used to take an entire consulting firm. You report to the Chief Security Officer, are part of the PSC leadership team, and own the team's work plan, priorities, capacity plan, and utilization.

What You'll Do

You lead the people, the delivery, and the operating model of PSC Engineering.

• Lead the team. Hire, onboard, coach, and develop PSC Engineers. Set objectives, run 1:1s and review cycles, give direct feedback early, and grow engineers into named technical owners of accounts and, where they are ready, into leaders.
• Run delivery. Own execution of every engagement, from technical scoping and staffing to deliverable review and debrief, including Level 2 support. Set the playbooks, peer-review gates, and quality criteria, and report the KPIs that show whether delivery is healthy: utilization, time-to-deliverable, escape rate, and customer satisfaction.
• Own capacity and utilization. Plan the team's work against the demand pipeline, balance billable work with managed-service shifts and capability development, and manage utilization to target.
• Operationalize the managed services. Stand up and scale PSIRTaaS and Standards and Regulations Compliance-as-a-Service: runbooks, staffing model, SLAs, and, with Product, the platform capabilities each service depends on.
• Connect the field to the product. Collaborate with our Chief Product Security Engineer to make sure field-built tooling is logged and paved into the product rather than kept as a parallel roadmap, and represent the team in the Product Paving Council, our field-to-product forum.
• Own senior customer outcomes. Serve as the one of our trusted senior delivery contacts for strategic accounts, lead service reviews and escalations, and partner with Sales on technical scoping and expansion. 

Qualifications

• 3+ years of direct people management. You have hired, supervised, and developed engineers, run performance cycles, and handled underperformance directly. This is the core of the role.
• A record of mentoring, coaching, and teaching. You can point to specific people you developed, what changed for them, and how you did it.
• Prior exposure to formal management or leadership training, such as a company leadership development program, a management course or certificate, or an equivalent structured program, and you can describe what you took from it.
• 8+ years in product security, embedded and connected device security, application security, or offensive security, a meaningful portion of it in customer-facing services, consulting, or managed services.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Hands-on depth in two or more of: firmware and binary analysis; penetration testing of embedded or IoT systems; threat modeling and threat analysis and risk assessment (TARA); SBOM and software composition analysis; vulnerability disclosure and CVE/CNA workflows; PSIRT operations.
• Demonstrated ability to run a technical delivery function to SLAs, SLOs, and quality standards, including capacity and utilization management in a billable context.
• Working knowledge of the EU Cyber Resilience Act and at least one of IEC 62443, RED EN 18031, FDA premarket cybersecurity requirements, ETSI EN 303 645, or NIST SSDF; and of ISO/IEC 29147 and 30111, CVSS, VEX, and SBOM formats (SPDX, CycloneDX).

What Makes You a Fit

• You know your craft. Deep, hands-on product security expertise across embedded software and hardware, firmware analysis, penetration testing, and risk assessment. You can still review that work with authority.
• You hold the quality bar. Nothing you cannot defend reaches a customer. Peer review is how your team works, not a step it skips under pressure.
• You build systems, not heroics. Repeatable work becomes playbooks, runbooks, and tooling, so a small team scales without burning out. 
• You communicate at every altitude. Clear in writing and speech with engineers, executives, regulators, and partners. You own escalations and can lead difficult conversations.
• You are an AI-native speaker. You use LLMs and agentic tooling as force multipliers in technical and management work, with the judgment to know where the human must own the result.

Nice to Have

• You have built a service line before. A managed service or consulting offering, from process and runbooks to staffing model and SLAs.
• You carry credentials. CISSP, CSSLP, GIAC, or OSCP; CISM, CRISC, ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer, or IEC 62443 Cybersecurity Expert. A plus, not a gate.
• You secure complex systems. Sector depth in aerospace, medical, automotive, energy, or industrial cyber-physical systems and their TARA methods (ISO/SAE 21434, IEC 62443-3-2, MITRE EMB3D).
• You know federal cyber policy. JSIG, ICD 503, NIST SP 800-160. Clearance eligibility is a plus, not a requirement.