VP of Products & Platform - AI/Security

The Position: VP of Products & Platform

MetaDefender Core | Enterprise Shared Services | Platform Architecture | AI-First Operations Protecting the World's Critical Infrastructure

Every MetaDefender product runs on a common foundation, this role's domain. The VP of Platform will transform it into the definitive substrate that every product team builds on, every customer deploys with confidence, and every enterprise buyer trusts to meet their most demanding requirements.

But foundation is not an ambition - category is. This role owns the platform that defines what File Security means as an enterprise discipline, distinct from and irreducible to "antivirus." You will be expected to grow this into a business with its own gravity: a named market category that OPSWAT leads, not a feature that competes inside someone else's.

This is also an AI-first mandate. You will build a platform where agentic capability is native in the product, in operations, and in how the platform team itself works, and you will use AI as the primary lever to drive organizational change and adoption velocity across the company.

This is not a maintenance role. It directly shapes how every product in the MetaDefender portfolio ships, deploys, and operates. You will own the most horizontally impactful technology in the company; few platform roles touch this much surface area. Product leaders at OPSWAT stay close to the technology — you'll work alongside peers who read code, challenge architectures, and ship.

What You'll Be Doing

1. MetaDefender Core — Product Strategy & Technical Direction

MetaDefender Core is the center of OPSWAT's File Security ecosystem — Deep Content Disarm & Reconstruction (CDR), multi-scanning across 30+ engines, file-based vulnerability assessment, dynamic analysis with next-gen sandbox, and many other layers, across billions of files for the world's most security-conscious organizations.

• Own the technical vision for Core's evolution: modular multi-engine orchestration, processing throughput, format coverage, and API extensibility.
• Frame Core as the engine of File Security, not a scanner. Articulate at the platform level why protecting the complex enterprise file ecosystem (ingest, transfer, storage, collaboration, supply chain) requires layered, defense-in-depth file analysis, and why single-engine antivirus is structurally insufficient.
• Drive strategy to serve new file modalities, archives, encrypted containers, firmware, ML/AI model files as the attack surface expands.
• Ensure Core's architecture enables adjacent products rather than constraining them.
• Shape the growth trajectory with a path toward full P&L ownership as the role and platform mature.
  
  

1. Enterprise Shared Services — The Foundational Platform Layer

This is the highest-leverage work at OPSWAT: the unified platform every mature MetaDefender product adopts for a consistent, enterprise-grade experience. Your mandate: make adoption a choice teams make willingly, not a mandate they resent.

Shared Services spans the cross-cutting capabilities every product would otherwise rebuild — installation & deployment (online, offline/air-gapped, headless, automated), identity & access (SSO, RBAC, SAML/OIDC, federation), configuration & policy, observability, reporting & audit, HA/DR, and zero-downtime scale, and shared, brand-compatible, language-agnostic UI components. You own the strategy, the developer experience, and the adoption outcome — not a feature checklist.

Success is measured in voluntary adoption: peer teams integrate because it is the fastest, safest path to enterprise-readiness.

1. AI-First Platform & Agentic Operations

• Make agentic capability a native primitive of the platform — exposed to product teams as a service, not bolted on per product.
• Embed AI across the operational surface: triage, configuration, deployment, observability, and customer time-to-value.
• Use AI to drive organizational change — accelerate engineering velocity, internal adoption, documentation, and decision speed across teams. You are expected to model what an AI-first product org looks like.
• Hold the line on rigor: define where human-in-the-loop is mandatory, design for AI failure modes, and prevent "AI theater" that adds risk without measurable value.
  
  

1. Category & Business Leadership

• Treat the platform as a business, not a cost center: own the narrative, the positioning, and ultimately the P&L.
• Define and lead the File Security category — language, reference architectures, buyer education, and competitive framing that make OPSWAT the default answer.
• Translate platform capability into enterprise buyer value and pricing leverage.

1.  Enterprise Deployment & Infrastructure Expertise
   

OPSWAT's customers operate in some of the most constrained and regulated environments on Earth. This role requires deep fluency in how enterprise software is deployed, operated, and maintained:

• On-Premises: Internet-connected and fully air-gapped, across Windows and Linux.
• Cloud & IaaS: AWS, Azure, GCP — marketplace offerings, reference architectures, cloud-native integrations.
• Kubernetes & Containers: Helm, operators, cloud-agnostic deployment patterns.
• Hybrid & Edge: Centralized management with distributed processing across environments.

What You'll Do in the First 12 Months

• Audit & Roadmap (Months 1–3): Deep-dive into Shared Services adoption, Core architecture, deployment tooling, and the current AI/agentic surface. Deliver a prioritized platform roadmap with clear adoption milestones and a File Security category thesis.
• Internal Evangelism (Months 3–6): Establish the platform team as an internal product organization. Build relationships with every product PM and engineering lead. Ship quick wins — including AI-driven ones — that demonstrate value and earn trust.
• Accelerate Adoption (Months 6–12): Drive measurable Shared Services adoption across the portfolio. Modernize Core for next-generation scale. Establish deployment patterns and agentic workflows that reduce customer time-to-value.

You will directly collaborate with 2 dedicated engineering teams (40+ headcount) while influencing platform adoption across 12+ peer engineering teams globally.

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• 15+ years in platform engineering, developer platforms, or infrastructure product management, with 5+ years in senior leadership owning platform strategy. 
• AI-first product leadership. Demonstrated use of AI/agentic systems as a product surface and as an operating model — including using AI to drive organizational change, velocity, and adoption. Working fluency in LLM evaluation, agentic design, human-in-the-loop, and AI failure modes.
• Customer-deployed software depth (not pure SaaS): you understand the pain of on-prem upgrades, air-gapped installs, and enterprise change management.
• Architectural fluency across Kubernetes, containerization, IaaS (AWS/Azure/GCP), and traditional on-prem. You evaluate trade-offs and challenge engineering decisions; you don't need to debug Helm.
• File Security depth beyond antivirus. You understand why securing the enterprise file ecosystem is a layered discipline (CDR, multiscanning, vulnerability and dynamic analysis, DLP, supply-chain/SBOM) and you can articulate that strategy and the platform architecture to deliver it.
• Earned-adoption track record: internal platforms other teams chose to adopt. You know the difference between mandating and earning.
• Enterprise software acumen: SSO/SAML/OIDC, RBAC, multi-tenancy, audit logging, zero-downtime deployments, observability — shipped, not theorized.
• Strong communicator and internal seller: align peer PMs, convince skeptical engineering leads, present strategy to executive leadership.
• Metrics-driven leadership: define KPIs for adoption, performance, scalability, and customer impact; use dashboards and qualitative signals to prioritize and hold teams accountable.
• Curiosity, ownership, and bias for action: move fast with emerging technology while maintaining architectural rigor and long-lived resilience.

Strong Differentiators

• Category creation experience is a strong plus. You have been a product leader at a category leader or spearheaded the creation of a market category. You've built the narrative, not just the feature.
• Business-building toward category definition: you've grown a platform or product into a named market with its own P&L.
• Data pipeline / high-volume processing: ETL, iPaaS, RPA, or file-processing systems handling mission-critical workloads.
• Cybersecurity or critical infrastructure: compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, NIST, Common Criteria), regulated deployments, security-first architecture.
• Multi-product platform scaling: taken a platform from partial to full adoption across a portfolio, navigating tech debt, org politics, and prioritization battles.
• Open-source / inner-source model: contribution frameworks that let distributed teams extend platform capabilities.

This Role is NOT For You If…

• You've only worked in pure SaaS with no exposure to on-prem or air-gapped deployment complexity.
• You think "platform" means building internal tools nobody asked for. This requires obsessive customer empathy — your customers are internal product teams and end-user enterprises.
• You think "File Security" is just antivirus, or you can't articulate why it isn't.
• You treat AI as a checkbox. This role expects AI-first instincts and the judgment to know where AI must not be in the loop.
• You want a pure people-management role. This is a hands-on strategy: you'll be in the architecture, the specs, and the trade-off discussions daily.