Director of Software Engineering

About SANS

Founded in 1989, SANS Institute (SANS) began as a cooperative research and education organization. Over the next 25 years, it grew to become the most trusted and widely recognized provider of information security training and certification in the world. Today, SANS has served more than 300,000 cybersecurity professionals around the world, with more than 60,000 earning Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC) security certifications—the leading certification that provides assurance to employers that their people and prospective hires can do the job.

At the heart of SANS is a community of practitioners, from auditors and network administrators to CISOs, who share their lessons learned and collaborate on solutions to the challenges they face. These experts, working across corporations, government agencies, and universities, come together to support and strengthen the global information security community.
Why SANS?

At SANS, our culture is defined by three pillars: Mission, Brand, and People.

- Our Mission is to hire people who understand the importance fighting against cybersecurity threats.

- Our Brand reflects a commitment to delivering the highest quality training.

- Our People are grounded in a culture of fairness, honesty, customer focus, and a pragmatic approach.

What You’ll Achieve at SANS

We are seeking a Director of Software Engineering to join our Product Development team. This role plays a key part in

providing senior technical and organizational leadership for SANS’ Cloud Platform Engineering organization — spanning platform core services (identity, product administration, and entitlements), DevOps tools and services, website engineering, and courseware & platform orchestration — while serving as the engineering executive for Project CORE, SANS’ enrollment and entitlement modernization program. This role leads individual contributors and engineering teams through their managers and leads; owns shared engineering platforms, standards, tooling, and vendor relationships; and drives the architecture, delivery, and cross-functional coordination required to modernize SANS’ enrollment, entitlement, and administrative systems. The Director partners closely with Product, Operations, Sales, Finance, and fellow engineering directors to translate business strategy into secure, scalable, and maintainable systems.

As a Director of Software Engineering, you will:

- Lead, manage, and mentor individual contributors and engineering teams through managers and leads.

- Own engineering standards and best practices — CI/CD, code quality, secure development — and facilitate architecture governance across teams.

- Plan and balance engineering capacity against shifting business priorities, communicating trade-offs to stakeholders.

- Lead strategic modernization programs end to end: architecture, cross-team commitments, delivery planning, and executive reporting.

- Direct modernization of core product platforms — enrollment, entitlement, identity, and product services — including integration with enterprise systems and retirement of legacy tooling.

- Measure engineering effectiveness and drive continuous improvement across teams.

- Champion incident management discipline and publish regular engineering communications to stakeholders.

- Other duties as assigned.

What We’re Looking For

Every SANS employee brings something unique. For this role, we’re looking for candidates with:

- BS or MS in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent industry experience.

- At least 10 years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and 3+ years managing through engineering managers or leads.

- Demonstrated success leading a large, multi-team modernization or systems-integration program from design through delivery.

- Strong technical acumen with prior hands-on development experience and the ability to guide architectural decisions across services, integrations