What's It Like to Work at Dragos?

How does your team’s work connect to company purpose?

Our mission is to safeguard civilization. We protect the operational technology that runs power grids, pipelines, water systems and manufacturing. For our product an engineering teams, that means building the Dragos Platform that defenders and operators rely on.

That mission is personal to me. I started my career wiring burner control panels for industrial furnaces and boilers, and I’ve worked in OT ever since. Early on, during a plant outage, a vendor kept asking how many users were affected. The real question was what had stopped running and what was at risk. An outage can cost a plant hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars an hour, damage equipment and put workers, families and communities at risk. You don’t need an OT background to learn that mindset. Many of our engineers come from software, cloud and IT security.

At Dragos, your work directly affects our customers and the communities they serve. When a utility can see what’s connected to its network or a manufacturer catches an intrusion before it reaches the plant floor, we’ve helped protect something people depend on. Safeguarding civilization isn’t just a tagline. It reflects our mission and goal every day.

What product decisions reflect your organization’s mission?

In OT, even a small product decision can affect safety and production, so we weigh what operators can safely put into practice, not just what technology can do. For example, our research shows that only three to six percent of OT vulnerabilities require immediate action. Rather than handing plant teams thousands of issues they can’t patch until a scheduled maintenance window, we use intelligence and operational context to prioritize based on what matters to the organization.

Dragos EmberAI, our AI agent for OT, draws on over a decade of Dragos research and incident response to help analysts investigate alerts and run threat hunts. Analysts approve every change, and it never runs autonomously because one wrong change could stop production or put people at risk. Poor segmentation showed up in 81 percent of our architecture reviews, so we help teams validate every connection before they change security rules. 

Our mission to safeguard civilization doesn’t stop at who can afford protection. Through our Community Defense Program, 100+ small utilities receive protection at no cost. Every feature starts with the security practitioner and plant operator. If they won’t trust it and can’t safely use it, we don’t build it. 

How do you bring values into day-to-day engineering?

At Dragos, our four core values of trust, transparency, authenticity and being mission-driven underpin how we work together to bring our mission to life. Across teams, that means keeping the people who rely on our technology at the center of every decision we make.

For example, the product management team visits customer sites, observes security teams and walks facilities ranging from utilities and refineries to food and pharmaceutical production lines. It’s hard to write requirements for equipment you’ve never stood next to.

Those firsthand insights help inform engineering decisions. Our product managers and engineers collaborate to build capabilities around the operator’s job that can help improve an organization’s visibility, security and control while also ensuring resiliency and efficiency of operations.

That collaboration extends to our threat intelligence and incident response teams. They bring knowledge of the groups targeting industrial systems and lessons from real attacks into early designs and prototypes, staying involved through release. Together, this shared expertise helps us build technology grounded in the realities our customers face.