SonicWall is a cybersecurity forerunner with more than 30 years of expertise and is recognized as a leading partner-first company, ensuring our partners and their customers are never alone in the fight against cybercrime. With the ability to build, scale and manage security across the cloud, hybrid and traditional environments in real-time, SonicWall provides relentless security against the most evasive cyberattacks across endless exposure points for increasingly remote, mobile and cloud-enabled users. With its own threat research center, SonicWall can quickly and economically provide purpose-built security solutions to enable any organization—enterprise, government agencies and SMBs—around the world. For more information, visit www.sonicwall.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Senior Director - Data & AI Engineering
Role Overview
We are looking for a hands-on, product-minded Senior Director of Data & AI Engineering to lead our newly formed, elite Data & AI team. In this role, you will lead a highly specialized team comprising data and AI/ML architects.
You are the bridge between deep technical innovation and product delivery. You will not only manage and guide these world-class engineers, but you will also remain actively hands-on—writing code, architecting solutions, and directly collaborating with Product Management, UX, and Core Security Platform teams to transform complex telemetry (logs, configs, alerts) into shipped, high-value AI features.
Key Responsibilities
1. Technical Leadership & People Management
- Lead an Elite Team: Manage, mentor, and align with a highly senior team of architects. You must possess the deep technical credibility to lead peers of this caliber.
- Keep a "Player-Coach" Mindset: Remain actively hands-on. You will contribute to architecture design, write code where needed, perform high-level reviews, and unblock complex technical bottlenecks alongside your team.
- Cultivate a High-Performance Culture: Foster an environment of rapid experimentation, continuous learning, and rigorous engineering standards, balancing cutting-edge AI research with disciplined production deployment.
2. Cross-Functional Product Development & Strategy
- Translate Tech into Product: Partner closely with Product Management to define the AI roadmap, translating complex engineering breakthroughs into clear, highly valuable customer features.
- Bridge the Gap with Core Security Teams: Collaborate with our core security researchers and platform engineers to seamlessly integrate our data and AI runtime pipelines into the broader product ecosystem.
- Design User-Centric AI Experiences: Work with UX designers to ensure AI-driven recommendations, summaries, and analyses are intuitive, actionable, and seamlessly woven into user workflows.
3. Execution & Delivery
- Own the Release Cycle: Drive the agile execution and delivery of Data and AI-powered product features from ideation to production.
- Balance Speed vs. Guardrails: Establish the processes required to ship fast while ensuring the data security, compliance, and strict model guardrails necessary in a cybersecurity product.
- Manage Stakeholders: Communicate technical concepts, timelines, and business impacts clearly to executive leadership, customers, and cross-functional teams.
Required Experience & Skills
- Experience: 8+ years of engineering leadership experience, with at least 3+ years managing high-performing data, machine learning, or platform engineering teams.
- Hands-on Technical Background: A strong technical foundation in software architecture, distributed data systems, or machine learning (ideally with modern generative AI and LLM orchestration). You should still feel comfortable looking at code and diving deep into technical design docs.
- Product Delivery Track Record: Proven experience shipping complex, data-driven features or enterprise SaaS products from scratch.
- Cybersecurity Domain Context: Previous experience working in a security product environment (navigating security logs, firewall/cloud configurations, threat detection, or compliance frameworks) is highly preferred.
- Exceptional Communication: The ability to translate technical AI and data concepts into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders, and vice-versa.
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SonicWall is an equal opportunity employer.
We are committed to creating a diverse environment and are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.
At SonicWall, we pride ourselves on recruiting a diverse mix of talented people and providing active security solutions in 100+ countries.
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Skills Required
- 8+ years of engineering leadership experience
- 3+ years managing high-performing data, machine learning, or platform engineering teams
- Hands-on coding, architecture design, and ability to review/produce technical design docs
- Strong technical foundation in software architecture, distributed data systems, or machine learning
- Proven track record shipping complex, data-driven features or enterprise SaaS products from scratch
- Experience with modern generative AI and LLM orchestration
- Previous experience in a security product environment (logs, firewall/cloud configs, threat detection, compliance)
- Exceptional communication translating technical AI/data concepts to non-technical stakeholders
SonicWall Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about SonicWall and has not been reviewed or approved by SonicWall.
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Healthcare Strength — Health, dental, vision, mental-health support, and wellness programs are part of the package. Feedback suggests coverage breadth is a dependable component of total rewards.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO, paid holidays and sick time, and bereavement leave are described alongside flexible or remote options. Feedback suggests ample time away meaningfully supports balance.
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Retirement Support — A 401(k) and core financial protections such as life and disability insurance are included. Feedback suggests these fundamentals meet standard expectations for many.
SonicWall Insights
What We Do
SonicWall has been fighting the cyber-criminal industry for over 25 years defending small, medium-size businesses and enterprises worldwide. Backed by research from the Global Response Intelligent Defense (GRID) Threat Network, our award-winning real-time breach detection and prevention solutions, coupled with the formidable resources of over 10,000 loyal channel partners around the globe, are the backbone securing more than a million business and mobile networks and their emails, applications and data. This combination of products and partners has enabled a real-time cyber defense solution tuned to the specific needs of the more than 500,000 global businesses in more than 215 countries and territories.
