Distinguished Engineer, R&D Lead

You own three things. How you balance your time across them will shift as the landscape evolves and as you develop your own view of where the highest-leverage opportunities lie.

1. Solve the Hard Problems

The roadmap contains technical challenges that can’t be solved by delivery teams working in two-week sprints. These are ambiguous, cross-cutting problems that require structured discovery before anyone can commit to building them. You lead time-boxed R&D cycles to produce prototypes and clear recommendations: build, explore further, or stop.

Current challenges in this space include areas like unified risk modelling, signals for MCP and other services, and AI code detection accuracy, but you will shape this backlog in collaboration with the rest of the teams, not merely execute it.

2. Push into the Whitespace

This is genuinely forward-looking work. As developer workflows move toward fully agentic development, new technical questions are emerging that the industry hasn’t answered yet. How do you convert human security expertise into formats that AI coding agents consume natively? How do you govern an autonomous agent that writes, tests, and deploys code? What does code provenance mean when five agents contribute to a single commit? How should enterprise security intelligence integrate with the MCP ecosystem?

SCW holds thousands of vulnerability patterns and secure coding challenges across dozens of languages — the raw material for a new class of agent-consumable security intelligence. You own the technical discovery of how to deliver that intelligence, working in close partnership with our content and security domain experts.

The agent governance space is whitespace. The competitive window is narrow. Your job is to explore it faster and more rigorously than anyone else in the market.

3. Keep us Pointing Forwards

The control plane roadmap is sequenced against a model of developer AI adoption, but the market moves fast enough that the model can become stale. You provide the structured intelligence that keeps the product organization pointed at where developers are heading, not where they were six months ago.

This means tracking real-world developer workflows, monitoring competitive dynamics, scanning emerging technology and academic research, and synthesizing it into regular outputs that directly inform product and content strategy. You will publish a monthly Developer Workflow Pulse and a quarterly Landscape Brief — these become core inputs to roadmap decisions and, over time, raw material for SCW’s external thought leadership.

The Frontier Pod Model

Your primary vehicle for structured discovery is the Frontier Pod — a temporary, cross-functional team formed around a single named problem for a six-week cycle. You convene the pod, define the problem brief, draw in the right expertise from across product domains, and present findings at the end of each cycle with a clear recommendation.

This model gives you access to the right people for each problem — security domain experts, product analytics, engineers who understand specific signal pipelines — without maintaining a fixed team that would lack the right expertise for most problems. The pod dissolves at the end of the cycle; follow-on work is either stopped, extended, or transferred to a delivery domain for production build.

This role can be based remotely, with a preference for timezone overlap with our APAC engineering team (Sydney), where the AI Governance and Risk Intelligence domains — the primary consumers of R&D output — are based. Periodic travel to Sydney for Frontier Pod kickoffs and leadership alignment is expected.

Connected to Leadership

You report to the VP of Engineering, with priorities set jointly with the CPTO. You have a direct line to the CPTO for your recommendations.

External Engagement and Thought Leadership

For a company defining the AI Software Governance category, the R&D function must be connected to the external research community. You attend major industry conferences, follow academic research on AI safety and secure code generation, and contribute to SCW’s thought leadership by publishing benchmarks, frameworks, and research that build category credibility and attract talent.

Building the Function

This is a founding role, not a permanent solo act. If the strategic prototyping backlog stays deep and the agent governance work shows the promise we expect, a second R&D engineer is budgeted for 2027. You are hiring your future team and shaping what the R&D function becomes.

Technical Foundation

Research and Intelligence

Working Style

Strong Differentiators