Director of Operations, Office of the CTO

Your Opportunity:

The Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Tenable is where strategy, deep research, and product incubation come together. We translate where the market is going — agentic AI, post-quantum cryptography, AI-driven attacker tradecraft, the next generation of exposure management — into bets that move our roadmap and our business.

We are looking for a Director of Operations to serve as the connective tissue and operating engine of OCTO. You will be a trusted advisor to the CTO and the senior partner who turns ambition into execution: shaping how the team works, where it spends its time, how its output reaches the rest of the company, and how it shows up externally with customers, partners, analysts, investors, and the board.

This is a high-leverage role for someone who is equally comfortable in a board prep session, an M&A diligence room, a customer briefing, and a product backlog review. You will operate with the autonomy of a principal-level leader and act as a credible proxy for the CTO in high-stakes settings.

Your Role:

Executive Partnership

• Partner with the CTO on C-level and board strategy, helping align our technical roadmap with market opportunities, company strategy, and long-term business outcomes.
• Support the CTO across internal and external engagements — board and executive meetings, industry conferences, analyst and investor conversations, marketing moments, All Hands, and Town Halls.
• Drive customer and partner engagement alongside the CTO, including Customer Advisory Boards, executive briefings, strategic account meetings, and design partner programs. Bring back the signal: what customers are actually asking for, where the gaps are, and what should change in our strategy or roadmap as a result.
• Own briefing, preparation, and follow-through for the CTO across engagements with the R&D leadership (the organizations under the CTO, CPO, and CSO) and across the company.
• Own the narrative arc across these moments: ensure messaging, materials, and follow-through are coherent, on-strategy, and ready for prime time.

Operations and resource leadership

• Operating rhythm. Establish and lead the OCTO operating cadence — leadership staff meetings, business and program reviews, planning cycles, and goals / OKR tracking. Monitor progress against commitments, proactively surface risks, dependencies, and trade-offs, and drive them to resolution.
• Operating tempo. Set the pace for research, experimentation, and incubation — moving at startup speed while meeting enterprise-grade standards. Keep the team focused on future-proofing the company against macro shifts such as agentic AI, AI-driven malware, and quantum-era cryptography.
• Talent and budget. Manage OCTO headcount and budget end-to-end, ensuring we have the right people in the right seats to prove feasibility to leadership and customers and to deliver on the CTO's priorities.
• Proxy and leverage. Act as the CTO's proxy in high-stakes environments across Tenable and externally. Drive diligence on potential acquisitions, support M&A workstreams, and help shape strategic partnerships and Tenable Ventures activity.

What You'll Need:

• 10+ years of experience across operations, strategy, product, or program leadership, acting as a strategic peer to senior tech executives (CTO/CPO).
• Deep exposure to cybersecurity, infrastructure, or developer tools, with the technical literacy to follow architecture conversations and ask product leaders the right questions.
• Outstanding ability to take ambiguous, high-stakes initiatives and turn them into structure, cadence, and outcomes—without becoming a process bottleneck.
• Exceptional capability to facilitate dialogue, challenge thinking, and drive alignment across senior stakeholders when you don’t own the org chart.
• Proven knack for toggling between shaping a board-level narrative and zooming in to fix a broken process or unblock a working session in the same hour.
• Genuinely hands-on mindset with a willingness to read the doc, write the doc, build executive-ready content, and ruthlessly own the follow-ups.
• Daily, hands-on use of frontier AI as a second brain for research, analysis, and workflows, with a natural drive to raise the AI fluency of everyone around you.
• Strong product and customer instincts, understanding how complex products actually get built, bought, and used by enterprise customers.
• Standout communication skills, capable of turning complex data and raw materials into something a senior executive can immediately understand and act on.
• A trusted partner who can read a room, navigate unspoken organizational sensitivities, and exercise absolute discretion around talent and strategy.
• High bias for action and comfort with ambiguity, preferring to frame the problem and propose an answer rather than waiting for one.

Nice to have

• Background in cybersecurity, exposure management, vulnerability management, or cloud/endpoint security.
• Experience inside an Office of the CTO, corporate strategy team, or innovation/incubation function at a public technology company.
• Commercial and financial fluency — comfort with budgets, business cases, and the basics of M&A diligence. You will work alongside experienced Corporate Development and Finance partners, so this is a plus, not a prerequisite.
• Exposure to investor relations, analyst relations, or partnership/BD work at the executive level.

#LI-NT1

#LI-Hybrid