Director - Customer Response Engineering

Job Title:

Director - Customer Response Engineering

About Trellix  
Trellix is a global cybersecurity leader helping organizations build cyber resilience for the AI era. Combining AI-native security, operational threat intelligence, and automated detection and response, Trellix provides defense-grade protection at machine speed across on-premises, air-gapped, operational technology, hybrid, and cloud environments. Trellix helps customers anticipate threats, scale effective security operations, maintain business continuity, and adapt their security posture for the modern threat landscape. Working with a broad partner ecosystem and global intelligence collaborators, Trellix helps strengthen the collective defense against cybercriminals and state-sponsored attacks. At Trellix, we empower professionals at all career stages to expand their technical expertise, lead strategic initiatives, and make a tangible global impact. Whether you are an industry pioneer or an emerging specialist, Trellix provides the tools and opportunities to enhance and expand your skill set. Join our mission to scale AI-driven cyber defense alongside an AI-accelerated threat landscape, and help build a safer, more resilient future. More at https://trellix.com.

Role Overview:

Customer Response Engineering (CRE) connects Trellix's most demanding customers directly to engineering. When a critical issue hits a customer's production environment, CRE owns it from first contact to permanent fix, and makes sure the lesson reaches the product.

The Director leads CRE globally and owns engineering response for strategic customers across our endpoint, data security, email, and network products. The role also owns prevention: finding risk in customer environments before it becomes an incident.

Location: United States (remote or hybrid) Reports to: Chief Technology Officer Function: Engineering Travel: Up to 25%, domestic and international

About the Role

This role has three pillars. Strong candidates will be exceptional in at least two.

Customer obsession. You treat a customer's problem as yours until it is solved. You know where each account stands and act before the customer has to ask twice.

Calm under pressure. You stay steady in front of a frustrated executive, a hard deadline, and several internal teams with competing priorities. You lower the temperature, set a plan, and hold people to it.

Deep technical skill with an AI-first mindset. You can read a crash dump, a process trace, or a packet capture and argue root cause with senior engineers. Your first move on a hard problem is to ask how AI can shorten it.

You also work well across teams. CRE succeeds only when Technical Support, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, Product Management, and Engineering pull in the same direction.

What You Will Do

• Lead the global CRE team. Hire, develop, and retain senior engineers, and set the technical bar.
• Own engineering response for critical customer issues, from first engagement through workaround, hotfix, and permanent fix.
• Command major customer incidents: assign roles, run the bridge, and keep the customer and our executives informed.
• Serve as the senior technical contact for customer security and IT executives.
• Run blameless root cause analyses and track corrective actions until the systemic fix ships.
• Build and run a lab that reproduces customer environments. Use it to reproduce issues quickly and to test releases before customers deploy them.
• Hold regular technical health reviews with customers against agreed response and resolution targets.
• Partner with Technical Support, Customer Success, Product Management, and Engineering so issues reach the right engineer fast and customer feedback reaches the roadmap.
• Run a rotation program that brings product engineers into CRE.
• Use AI tools in triage, root-cause analysis, and fix development.
• Report on response and resolution times, repeat incidents, and customer health.

About You

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Based in the United States and authorized to work in the U.S.
• 10+ years in enterprise security or infrastructure across engineering, sustaining or escalation engineering, professional services, or advanced technical support.
• 5+ years leading technical teams, including senior individual contributors.
• A record of owning high-stakes customer escalations through to resolution and retaining the customer.
• Experience leading major incident response with defined roles and structured postmortems.
• Hands-on depth in Windows internals and at least one of Linux or macOS: drivers, process and DLL behavior, file system and ACL semantics, and system performance.
• Working knowledge of network and email security.
• Experience presenting technical findings to customer executives under pressure.
• Practical use of AI or LLM tools in debugging, triage, or engineering workflows.
• Ability to support customers in regulated sectors: government, defense, financial services, healthcare.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites and Trellix offices worldwide.
• Flexibility to work outside standard U.S. hours with global teams and customers, and during critical incidents.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Trellix, McAfee, or FireEye products, or comparable endpoint, data, email, and network security platforms.
• Experience in air-gapped, on-premises, and hybrid deployments at enterprise scale.
• Experience leading globally distributed teams.
• Experience running a hotfix or sustaining release process alongside an agile release train.
• Background in site reliability engineering or customer reliability practices.
• Active U.S. security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.

How Success Is Measured

• Response and resolution times against agreed customer targets.
• Mean time to root cause.
• Repeat incident rate.
• Corrective actions closed on schedule.
• Strategic customer retention and satisfaction.

Base Pay Range: $225K-275K. Actual base pay within this range will depend on varying circumstances, including the work location, individual qualifications, company budget and other operational business needs. Compensation may also include annual bonuses and long-term incentives, subject to various metrics and company policy.

Company Benefits and Perks:

We believe that the best solutions are developed by teams who embrace each other's unique experiences, skills, and abilities. We work hard to create a dynamic workforce where we encourage everyone to bring their authentic selves to work every day. We offer a variety of social programs, flexible work hours and family-friendly benefits to all of our employees.

• Retirement Plans

• Medical, Dental and Vision Coverage

• Paid Time Off

• Paid Parental Leave

• Support for Community Involvement

We're serious about our commitment to a workplace where everyone can thrive and contribute to our industry-leading products and customer support, which is why we prohibit discrimination and harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other legally protected status.

Our Commitment to You:

At Trellix, we are committed to creating a safe and trustworthy experience for our customers, employees, and candidates. Please be aware that fraudulent recruiting activity can occur through fake job postings or impersonated communications.

Trellix conducts interviews through professional channels only and does not use text messages, instant messaging, or group chats for interviews. We will never request sensitive personal information—such as your date of birth, Social Security number, or national ID number—during the interview process.

Trellix also does not require candidates to pay fees, purchase products or services, or process payments of any kind as part of the recruiting or hiring process. And Trellix will never keep any original work authorization documents that we may be required to review during the hiring process.

If you have questions or believe you may have encountered fraudulent activity related to Trellix recruiting, please contact us at[email protected].