Head of Platform Engineering

Company Overview:

TENEX is an AI-native, automation-first, built-for-scale Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider. We are a force multiplier for defenders, helping organizations enhance their cybersecurity posture through advanced threat detection, rapid response, and continuous protection. Our team is composed of industry experts with deep experience in cybersecurity, automation and AI-driven solutions. Backed by leading investors, we are rapidly growing and seeking top talent to join our mission of revolutionizing the AI-Native MDR landscape.

We're a fast growing startup backed by industry experts and top tier investors led by Crosspoint Capital Partners and also backed by Shield Capital, DTCP (formerly Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners), Deepwork Capital, and the Florida Opportunity Fund. Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). As an early employee, you'll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. Get in on the ground floor. We're a small but well-funded team that just raised a substantial round - joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside.

As a Head of Platform Engineering at TENEX, you will be a strategic leader responsible for defining the technical vision, architecture, and execution strategy for our core, high-performance cybersecurity platform. You will be accountable for the scalability, reliability, security, and operational excellence of the platform that powers our AI-driven MDR services, leading the teams that build and maintain our foundational infrastructure, data pipelines, and engineering standards.

Culture is one of the most important things at TENEX.AI - dive into our culture deck at culture.tenex.ai to see how we live it every day, with a deep emphasis on the collaboration and community that only in-person work delivers.

Job Responsibilities

• Define Platform Strategy & Architecture: Overview the entire service platform, overseeing architectural design, technology selection, and strategic planning to ensure the platform can scale to petabytes of security data and billions of daily events.

• Own the Platform Engineering Roadmap: Prioritize initiatives that maximize reliability, performance, security, and developer efficiency across our core systems.

• Lead Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Define and driving adherence to critical Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs), managing on-call rotations, and minimizing toil through automation.

• Drive Operational Excellence: Drive the platform, implementing advanced monitoring, observability (logs, metrics, tracing), automated provisioning, and disaster recovery strategies.

• Lead & Mentor Platform Engineering Team: Engineering managers and a diverse team of platform, data, and infrastructure engineers. Drive a culture of engineering rigor, operational ownership, and continuous improvement.

• Collaborate with Product Management & Security Operations: Translate new product requirements and operational needs into robust, scalable, and cost-effective platform solutions.

• Establish and Enforce DevSecOps Practices: Standarize CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), security testing, and deployment mechanisms to ensure rapid, secure, and reliable software delivery.

• Foster Innovation: Identify and driving the adoption of new engineering methodologies and infrastructure technologies. Push the frontier - leverage cloud-native patterns, advanced data stores, and distributed computing frameworks to maintain a competitive advantage.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Platform & Engineering Leadership Expertise

• 8+ years of progressive experience in Software or Platform Engineering, including 3+ years managing multiple engineering teams or a significant platform portfolio.

• Proven track record of architecting, building, and operating highly scalable, distributed, and secure enterprise-grade SaaS platforms.

• Expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, cloud-native architecture, and driving organizational process improvements in large-scale engineering environments.

Security & Technical Acumen

• 10+ years of experience in the cybersecurity, enterprise SaaS, or B2B technology industry.

• Deep expertise in scalable, distributed system architecture, microservices, and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) in a production environment.

• Strong understanding of modern security technologies such as SIEM, EDR, Threat Intelligence, and the challenges of processing high-volume, real-time security event data at scale.

• Strong fundamentals in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), networking, and building secure and compliant (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001) environments.

Data & AI/ML Platform Expertise

• Deep understanding of modern data architecture, including real-time data pipelines, stream processing, and large-scale data warehousing/lakehouse technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, Flink).

• Experience in defining and building the underlying infrastructure to support AI/ML model training, deployment, and monitoring (MLOps), including vector databases and feature stores.

Nice-to-have

• Prior experience in a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) or Managed Detection and Response (MDR) setting.

• Experience with graph databases or security-focused knowledge graphs.

• Background leading teams in high-growth startups or enterprise SaaS.

Soft Skills

• Exceptional communication, presentation, and negotiation skills, with the ability to articulate technical strategy to executive leadership, product teams, and external partners.

• Strong strategic thinking and analytical skills to solve complex engineering and operational problems.

• Proven ability to mentor, inspire, and grow senior technical talent and leadership within the organization.

• A strong passion for cybersecurity and a commitment to building security-first platforms and automation.

• Clear, concise communication skills and a bias for collaborative problem-solving.

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• Relevant certifications (e.g., cloud architecture, SRE, or security-related credentials) are a plus.