Director of R&D

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 R&D 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 six 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 employees. Each employee has a place in shaping the future of our industry.

About the role:

As the Director of Data Platform, you will lead one of Orca’s most critical and strategic engineering groups, responsible for building, scaling, and evolving the core data Ingestion, processing and serving infrastructure that powers our entire platform.

You will be accountable for the vision, strategy, execution, and delivery of the Data Platform group, empowering R&D teams across Orca with the data capabilities they need to drive innovation and deliver customer value. You’ll lead and grow multiple teams of engineers and managers, drive architectural and organizational excellence, and ensure our systems handle billions of cloud signals daily with performance, security, and reliability in mind.

We’re undergoing a major architectural transformation, evolving our pipelines toward real time processing, better observability, and horizontal scalability. This is an opportunity to lead foundational work that will shape Orca’s platform for years to come!

Our Stack: Python, Go, Rust, SingleStore, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis, Kafka, AWS

On a typical day you’ll:

• Define and drive the long term vision and roadmap for the Data Platform group.
• Lead, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of engineers and engineering managers.
• Collaborate with product and platform leadership to ensure alignment with business and technical goals.
• Make high-impact architectural and design decisions to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Set and maintain engineering excellence standards including clean code, CI/CD, testing, and monitoring.
• Own delivery and execution of large-scale initiatives from planning through release.
• Create a culture of innovation, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Act as a key technical leader and cross-functional collaborator across R&D and company leadership.
• Stay informed of industry trends and guide the team in adopting cutting edge technologies where relevant.

About you:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent experience; advanced degrees are a plus.
• 10+ years of professional experience in software development, with at least 5+ years in engineering leadership roles.
• Proven track record of leading high impact groups building scalable, data- intensive systems.
• Strong background in distributed systems, cloud native architectures, and real- time data processing.
• Hands on experience with modern infrastructure and data technologies such as Kafka, Elasticsearch, SingleStore, or similar.
• Deep understanding of software design principles, concurrency, memory management, and systems design.
• Experience managing managers, scaling organizations, and building effective processes.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence at all levels of the company.
• Passionate about mentoring talent, leading through impact, and delivering exceptional engineering outcomes.