Senior Director, Engineering- X-Ops Platform

About UsSophos is a global leader and innovator of advanced security solutions for defeating cyberattacks. The company acquired Secureworks in February 2025, bringing together two pioneers that have redefined the cybersecurity industry with their innovative, native AI-optimized services, technologies and products. Sophos is now the largest pure-play Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider, supporting more than 28,000 organizations. In addition to MDR and other services, Sophos’ complete portfolio includes industry-leading endpoint, network, email, and cloud security that interoperate and adapt to defend through the Sophos Central platform. Secureworks provides the innovative, market-leading Taegis XDR/MDR, identity threat detection and response (ITDR), next-gen SIEM capabilities, managed risk, and a comprehensive set of advisory services. Sophos sells all these solutions through reseller partners, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) worldwide, defending more than 600,000 organizations worldwide from phishing, ransomware, data theft, other every day and state-sponsored cybercrimes. The solutions are powered by historical and real-time threat intelligence from Sophos X-Ops and the newly added Counter Threat Unit (CTU). Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at www.sophos.com.Role SummaryWe are seeking a Sr. Director of Engineering to lead our X-Ops Platform organization. The leader will be responsible for all aspects of the platform ranging from vision, strategy and roadmap to product delivery and service execution. The leader will coordinate with stakeholders to align business priorities and support engineering teams in delivering secure, high-quality software at scale using modern AI technologies.You will set strategy and standards for how we build, run, and improve our platforms and operational tooling across the engineering lifecycle - partnering closely with Product, Security, IT, and Engineering leaders. Success in this role looks like improved developer productivity, strong service reliability and resilience, clear operational governance, and efficiency in cloud and platform spend and close alignment with Sophos X-Ops goals.You bring enough technical depth to challenge and support senior engineers and architects, while spending most of your time enabling teams, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring execution against clear outcomes. You will have a strong grounding in Cyber Security, Cloud Computing and AI frameworks and development practices.You will lead and grow multiple teams and managers, fostering strong engineering practices and a culture of ownership. You will collaborate with senior stakeholders across Engineering, Product, Security, IT, and Finance to ensure platform roadmaps and operational priorities support company goals.This role is based in Abingdon UK with remote working and teams also in India and Hungary. Periodic in-person leadership and team collaboration and travel are needed.What You Will DoSet the vision, strategy, and operating model for the X-Ops Platform organisation (e.g., Delivery Roadmap, AI First Developer Experience, CI/CD, Observability, SRE, Cloud & Infrastructure Enablement)Lead, coach, and develop engineering leaders (directors, managers and senior ICs), building high-performing teams with clear ownership and strong engineering cultureOwn platform reliability, resilience, and operational excellence: incident management, on-call standards, SLIs/SLOs, post-incident learning, and continuous improvementPartner with product engineering and threat research leaders to improve productivity and delivery throughput across the software and service lifecycleDrive cloud efficiency and cost transparency (FinOps): budgeting, forecasting, unit economics, and optimisation initiatives in partnership with Finance and EngineeringEstablish platform governance and standards (architecture, security, compliance, data handling, vendor/tooling choices) while enabling appropriate team autonomyBuild strong cross-functional alignment peer X-Ops leaders, and other operational stakeholders to ensure aligned feature delivery and service operations.Actively drive responsible AI adoption within the organisation:Establish guidance, guardrails, and enablement for approved AI tools and workflowsMeasure impact and promote best practices that improve quality, speed, and operational effectiveness while protecting sensitive dataDefine and track meaningful metrics and outcomes; communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs clearly to executive stakeholdersWhat You Will BringCyber Security background and acumenSignificant engineering leadership experience, including leading leaders and scaling teams in a platform, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or operations-focused environmentStrong track record of building reliable, secure platforms and improving developer productivity through pragmatic, outcome-driven investmentExperience establishin