As the VP of R&D at OP Innovate, you will shape and lead the engineering organization across two distinct product lines — one a cloud-native SaaS platform developed in an Agile environment, and the other an on-premise enterprise-grade solution delivered in a structured, milestone-driven model.

This is primarily a leadership role with a strong focus on organizational growth, process discipline, and delivery execution. You’ll serve as a key member of the executive team, ensuring the engineering organization is structured, motivated, and aligned with company strategy.

You will be expected to:

• Define and implement R&D organizational structure, scaling from a lean team to a robust, multi-disciplinary group across development, QA, DevOps, and project ownership.
• Drive operational excellence, introducing frameworks for planning, execution, performance tracking, and interdepartmental alignment.
• Lead and mentor engineering leaders, creating a culture of ownership, accountability, and high performance.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, customer success, and executive leadership to balance innovation with delivery commitments.
• Maintain technical fluency to guide high-level architecture and technical decision-making, but delegate implementation responsibilities to team leads and senior engineers.

 Key Challenges

• • Managing parallel R&D efforts with distinct delivery methodologies (Agile vs. milestone-driven).
  • Leading the transition from service-centric to product-centric R&D operations.
  • Attracting, retaining, and developing top talent in a competitive cybersecurity market.
  • Operating in a hybrid work model, ensuring cohesion and accountability across distributed teams.

• Lead outbound prospecting efforts to identify and engage potential customers through LinkedIn, email, and phone outreach.
• Qualify leads using structured frameworks (e.g., BANT) and schedule discovery calls, product demos, and technical assessments.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor, explaining cybersecurity challenges and demonstrating how OP Innovate’s solutions, including the WASP platform, address client needs.
• Conduct technical sales presentations and product demos, effectively communicating product features, value propositions, and competitive advantages.
• Analyze sales data and market trends to refine prospecting strategies, optimize sales funnel performance, and drive data-informed decision-making.
• Maintain accurate CRM records (HubSpot) to track customer interactions, manage leads, and ensure pipeline visibility.
• Develop sales enablement resources, including playbooks, FAQs, and competitive analysis to support sales execution.
• Collaborate with marketing and product teams to align messaging, refine go-to-market strategies, and generate targeted outreach campaigns.
• Support pricing and deal structuring discussions, ensuring solutions align with customer needs while maintaining business objectives.

• Deliver an end-to-end cybersecurity solution project for an operational system, covering the entire project lifecycle: technical, organizational, professional, financial, marketing, and lead generation aspects.
• Manage all contractual requirements and obligations with the customer and project subcontractors, including design reviews, integrations, POCs, and more.
• Manage the project team members, lead the matrix team members: system engineer, software development, cyber research. 
• Oversee the project team, leading matrix team members such as system engineers, software developers, and cybersecurity researchers.
• Coordinate and manage matrix interfaces with subcontractors to ensure seamless collaboration.
• Handle contractual aspects, including milestones, supervision, profitability analysis, procurement, and risk management.

• Define, Scope, establish and execute IT and Data Security Framework, and create and implement cybersecurity policies and procedures that support Oriente’s mission and business needs.
• Lead strategies enhancing the resilience and security of the IT systems, projects and underlying data at Oriente.
• Work directly with the business units to facilitate Information Security risk assessment and risk management processes.
• Responsible for allocating resources to ensure that staff delivers secure and robust IT solutions to Oriente internal and external customers.
• Oversee planning and execution of vulnerability audits, penetration testing or forensic IT audit and investigations according to agreed timelines..
• Oversee program of ongoing improvement based results of assessments, tests and audits, including integration of new IT Systems Development with the organization’s overall IT, Data and Information Security policies.
• Oversee incident triaging and handling, and function as focal point for stakeholders during incident response, and in the aftermath.
• Oversee regular staff training programs to increase security awareness skills, monitor compliance with internal guidelines, protocols, methodologies and procedures are implemented.
• Liaise with the organization’s DPO (Data Protection Officer), Compliance, and Legal team to ensure compliance with any related legislation, such as the Data Protection Act, ISO standards or relevant government regulations.
• Plan budget allocations and associated financial forecasts relating to IT, Data and Information security.

• Pentesting web and mobile applications.
• Breaking apart cloud infrastructure
• Performing secure code review and analysis.
• Managing an AppSec effort in a cloud-based environment.
• Guide and advise developer teams in certain milestones.
• Automations of attack chains to integrate in our PTaaS platform