R&D Team Lead (Runtime)

Skeletons, lasers, tattoo buses — the Torq brand grabs attention like nothing else in cybersecurity. And we're growing like crazy, backed by Series D funding, 200% employee growth, and 300% revenue growth. Fueling Torq's momentum is our game-changing AI SOC platform, backed by a team and culture that makes Torq one of Forbes' Best Startup Employers in America, and a Business Insider 'startup to bet your career on'.

Life at Torq is all gas, no brakes. We're a team of relentless, collaborative go-getters pushing the boundaries of what's possible for security automation. Every role is an essential driver of Torq's success as the AI-native autonomous SecOps platform of choice for security teams across the Fortune 500.

We are looking for a strong technical leader to lead our Runtime team - one of the most critical backend teams at Torq. The Runtime team owns the execution layer of all Torq automations, the core of our product. The team operates at a significant scale, processing hundreds of millions of steps and millions of security events every day in systems that simply cannot break.

You will lead a strong team of five senior engineers and take ownership of both the people and the technology. This role combines team management with deep technical leadership: developing engineers, setting the technical vision, leading design and architecture decisions, and staying close enough to the code to step in when needed.

What Will You Do?

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of five experienced backend engineers.

• Own the team’s technical vision, priorities, execution, and long-term direction.

• Lead the design and implementation of architectural changes that keep our platform reliable at massive scale.

• Drive complex, cross-team projects and influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team.

• Lead production incidents and post-mortems, and continuously raise the bar for reliability and operational excellence.

• Identify risks and problems before they impact production, and build the processes and infrastructure needed to prevent them.

• Stay close to the technology through design discussions, code reviews, debugging, and hands-on contribution when needed.

• Use data to understand how customers interact with the platform and turn emerging use cases into new product capabilities.

• Help lead significant technical initiatives, including the evolution from GCP toward a Multi-Cloud architecture.

• Work with modern AI tools such as Cursor and Claude Code as a core part of the development workflow, while maintaining deep technical understanding and high-quality standards.

What Should You Bring to the Table?

• At least 3 years of experience managing an engineering team.

• A strong backend engineering background with experience building complex, high-scale production systems.

• Proven ability to lead technical vision, System Design, and architecture discussions.

• Experience leading meaningful projects end-to-end and working across multiple teams.

• Strong production ownership, including leading incidents, post-mortems, and reliability improvements.

• A hands-on mindset and the ability to step into code, debugging, and code reviews when needed.

• Experience mentoring and developing senior engineers.

• Experience with Cloud infrastructure and services.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, monitoring, and observability technologies.

• A strong testing mindset, including automated testing and production monitoring.

• Experience with Go - an advantage.

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex decisions clearly and simply.

• High ownership, curiosity, and a proactive, can-do approach.

We build AI for a living, and we encourage candidates to use it to prep, research, and sharpen their best work. But we're hiring humans, not chatbots. We want the real you. Use AI to tighten your resume, prep for interviews, research Torq, and outline ideas for written responses. Show up as yourself for live interviews, final assessments (the voice, logic, and reasoning need to be yours), and anywhere we're evaluating how you think — not how you prompt.

Excited about our vision and ready to make an impact as we grow? We'd love to see what you can bring to the team.