Head of Applications (CFA)

Hello, let us introduce ourselves!

We are watchTowr, a VC-backed cybersecurity startup helping organizations continuously discover vulnerabilities in their Internet-facing attack surface. Cybersecurity veterans and technical experts, we are obsessed with building cybersecurity technology to help prevent breaches.

With experience informed by years of simulating sophisticated cyber attacks against some of the world's largest organizations, our mission is to enable organizations to continuously understand how an attacker would successfully compromise their business—with cutting-edge Attack Surface Management and Continuous Automated Red Teaming technology.

watchTowr was named within Gartner’s Emerging Tech Impact Radar report in 2023 and is utilized by Fortune 500 and other large enterprises globally. Our research is well-known and respected across the cybersecurity industry and can be found in various news outlets—while fueling the watchTowr Platform.

We are a young, high-energy, and high-performing team delivering world-class technology to help our clients prevent breaches. We are in a high and aggressive growth phase of our journey and are excited to continue adding colleagues to join our phorce of nature.

Our vision for offensive security is continuous.

But what’s the role?

We are looking for an ambitious Head of Applications to lead our global Application Technology team, in our mission of helping organisations understand how they could be compromised - in real-time. The role is based in the UK.

Sounds great – what will I do?

This is a global lead role across Singapore, the UK and the US, fostering a culture of technical excellence and high performance, and with exposure to both the backend and frontend of our customer-facing systems.

As Head of Applications, you will:

• Lead and grow the global Application Technology Team, building features such as account lifecycle management, access control, notifications, logging, multi-tenancy, and other SaaS capabilities for enterprise B2B clients.
• Be responsible for direct line management of CFA team, including working with Engineering Lead (CFA) in Singapore, to implement the global CFA strategy locally, ensuring technical alignment and consistent delivery standards.
• Build and scale a high-performance engineering culture through performance reviews, coaching, hiring, and career development pathways.
• Partner with Product Design to deliver user workflows that are both intuitive and robust, meeting customer and business needs.
• Solve complex data and technology challenges, including scaling data pipelines, ensuring secure and efficient access control, enabling reliable logging, and managing access segregation across multi-tenant environments.
• Shape engineering practices across teams, embedding quality, agility, and security into our delivery culture.
• Ensure global alignment across regions, fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and consistent execution of strategy.

Sounds perfect to me, what specifics are you looking for?

Ideal Experience

• 10+ years experience building and managing distributed engineering teams across multiple regions.global
• Proven experience as a global leader managing local leads (not just individual engineers).
• Track record of developing high-performing teams through hiring, structured performance reviews, mentoring, and career frameworks.
• Experience with cybersecurity platforms or security data at scale (ideally Threat Intelligence and/or Offensive Security-type solutions).
• Proven experience building engineering organisations in early-stage, B2B startups serving enterprise clients.
• Technical depth across:
  • Backend : Node.js, Typescript
  • Frontend : React.js, Typescript
  • Database : MySQL
  • Others : ECS, K8s, Airflow, Kafka, Serverless, AWS
• Strong understanding of SaaS application fundamentals, including onboarding, account lifecycle, authentication, granular authorisation, and SSO.
• Experience designing and operating systems for notifications, logging, multi-tenancy, and asset categorisation.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration, asynchronous tasks, and event-driven architecture.
• Exposure to platform engineering or developer tooling to improve delivery speed and reliability.
• Track record of driving Agile and DevOps practices in high-growth environments.
• Committed to engineering best practices: writing clean, testable code and applying effective testing strategies.

What’s in it for me?

• Competitive compensation - we believe that hard work, skills and ambition should be fairly compensated.
• Meaningful role in a company - You will be a key and early contributor to a fast-growing cybersecurity business that helps protect some of the world's largest enterprises.
• The best tools and powerful kit - we enable you with the tools to effectively fulfil your role.
• Endless opportunities – we are in a high-growth phase of our journey, and plan to promote from within as we scale.
• Work with cyber security experts – we are solving cutting-edge industry-wide cyber security challenges with some of the world’s most advanced organisations.

watchTowr is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer

At watchTowr, we’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and diverse environment where every individual is recognised for their talent and potential. Our hiring decisions are guided by your capabilities, experience, and what you bring to the role - not by unrelated personal attributes.

We have a zero-tolerance approach to any form of discrimination or harassment. This includes - but isn’t limited to - discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, colour, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, pregnancy or parental status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We actively encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. Even if you don’t tick every box in the job description, we’d still love to hear from you.