Project Manager (Services)

The opportunity: #

Cossack Labs is looking for a Project Manager to join our Professional Services team, responsible for numerous cybersecurity projects. In this role, you will collaborate closely with stakeholders, internal technical leaders, and engineering teams to ensure projects are completed on time, within budget, and consistently deliver outstanding value to the customer.

As this is a new role in the company, you will have the opportunity to shape its position.

Our professional services projects often evolve into multi-year, sophisticated joint operations with our customers, addressing some of their most sensitive business risks. The Project Manager, along with the technical project lead, become two facilitators of this relationship, in which customers rely on us to provide peace of mind and a lower risk posture for their business.

We are a data security solutions company, developing software products (open-source and proprietary), as well as providing custom bespoke solutions to innovative development teams around the world. Our mission is to make strong security methodologies and approaches convenient within modern infrastructures and, as the software is eating the world, help it eat the world responsibly, without leaking customer’s data.

Our software is well-known amongst security-aware teams, recommended by OWASP, and popular for easily solving complicated security challenges. Apart from building “off-the-shelf” solutions, we design custom security controls for novel problems.

We work in the B2B space, with customers such as power grid operators, payment processors, legal companies, million-user customer applications. We cater to young ambitious startups and well-established enterprises, who use our software and solutions as core part of their security arsenal. Our customers are smart, but extremely demanding.

Markets: EU, UK, USA.

You will: #

• Project Pre-sale Activities
  • Ensure long-term planning to determine if the upcoming project can fit into the timelines.
  • Assist with the Statement of Work and proposals during the sales process.
  • Gather project information and initial requirements, collect questionnaires, and lead customers through pre-sale activities.
• Resource Planning
  • Provide necessary predictions about teams’ capacity to help technical leaders shape the team during a project kickoff.
• Keep Things on Track and Monitor Project Health
  • Clarify requirements, plan milestones and timelines.
  • Set up communication rhythms and routines with customers and the team.
  • Collect access, follow up, and chase customers on non-technical matters. Identify opportunities for further cooperation and prevent hazards.
  • Troubleshoot issues.
  • Facilitate team rituals such as meetings, postmortems, retros, etc.
  • Support the team in putting together reports, timesheets, and updates for customers.
• Project Off-boarding Activities
  • Collect deliverables, deliver reports, coordinate off-boarding from client systems, internal learning, and retros.

We would expect you to have: #

• 5+ years of experience in project management.
• At least 2 years of experience with IT projects (software / hardware platforms, web and mobile applications, etc).
• Upper-intermediate level of English, both written and spoken.
• Strong understanding of the modern technological landscape.
• Strong troubleshooting skills and the ability to figure out ways to move projects ahead in complete chaos.
• Excellent discipline and self-organization skills.
• Strong leadership skills with highly specialised expert teams.
• Ability to make decisions and take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.

As a plus you’d have: #

• Experience in fields of information security/cybersecurity.
• Understanding of software development processes (SSDLC).
• A previous software engineering background is a significant additional factor to consider.
• Project management certification is a good additional factor to consider.
• A desire to minimise chances for chaos ahead of time.

Please note that you can be a perfect fit even if not everything we’ve outlined above applies to you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask – everyone is unique.

We offer: #

Unique area of expertise: #

• Interesting and challenging work in applied security engineering with our teams: designing ML security controls, supporting cryptographic protocols with security controls, protecting hardware, building reverse-resilient mobile apps, securing web apps for million of users, etc.
• Sharing your work as blogs posts, research papers and conference talks. We work with innovative companies all over the world, move quickly and dive into technologies others just hear about.
• Combining technologies: cryptography, software engineering, information security. You won’t be bored :)
• A sense of meaning and responsibility for those who seek purpose — we’re building “invisible texture of modern civilization” — bits of infrastructure finance, power grids, healthcare rely on, and we are trusted with very challenging aspects of it.

Environment: #

• Friendly and experienced team: smart people to learn from, great people to build with. Each of us is unique, we value and support each other.
• An atmosphere that motivates you to grow and get smarter every month, a healthy ratio of routine / experimentation.
• Trust: schedule, reporting, bureaucracy is kept at reasonable minimum. We hire smart people and trust them to do the right thing. When things go wrong, we help rather than punish.
• Shared decision making: this business is driven by engineering excellence, so engineers are important part of tactical and strategical business decisions.
• Friendly to humans: not just a formal vacation and sick leave quota. Feel like your mental or physical wellbeing needs care? Take some time off. Feel like working a few days from home? Sure. As long as you’re in line, we are here to support you when you’re not.

Growth: #

• Team that facilitates internal learning and growth all the time.
• Interesting technologies to work with — sometimes, even unique ones (we design applied cryptography schemes and techniques and novel ways to use them).
• Management attention to help you improve upon your personal goals (through 1:1s and mentoring).

Benefits: #

• Competitive compensation with flexible bonus scheme.
• Sick leaves, 21 business days for vacation per year, extra days off — according to the agreements and laws.
• Conferences, books, courses — we encourage learning and sharing with the community. Our team members share a lot in talks, workshops and blog posts.

Not sure but considering? Talk to us. #

If you see yourself fit but a few things are off — don’t hesitate to talk anyway. It might be that your unique combination of skills and knowledge would be perfectly fitting for our environment, but we both just don’t know it yet.

Why work at Cossack Labs? #

Some companies prioritise talent and value proposition, while others understand business and would take any job that pays well. However, only few companies choose to specialise in difficult tasks as their primary competency.

We take on difficult jobs, we take mission-critical software and make it mission-secure.

• Virtualise OT infrastructure securely in the presence of active adversaries, preventing them from accessing the susceptible nation-wide network? ✓ Check.
• Provide immediate application security and infrastructure security guidance for mission-critical application that will be deployed on thousands of devices on the front-line tomorrow? ✓ Check.
• Validate counter-reverse engineering protections for power grid hardware to ensure that previously air-gapped environments were safe to open up to the outside world? ✓ Check.
• Ensure that software platforms for exchange of sensitive documents actually have a top-tier SSDLC programme that supplements missing capabilities and builds out processes? ✓ Check.

We operate as a lean core team and a diverse network of experts. The finest people you may work with include PhDs in information security and cryptography, infosec community standard contributors, in-depth experts in rare security topics, and business-centric security engineers with broad experiences. Some of your teammates have worked in infosec since the 1990s and saw the industry grow from nothing. Some of them helped write standards that govern security around you. Maybe someone’s work actually keeps the lights up while you’re reading this?

Our core engineers go through extensive indoctrination and training to become disciplined, stringent, self-sufficient field unit who owns the outcomes rather than just showing up for work.

As you grow into the Cossack Labs engineer, you’ll work on slow-paced projects to learn and improve, internal projects to innovate and build tools, and of course a few fires, because no smooth sea can make a skilled sailor. You’ll discover what works for you and what you need to learn.

We help innovators who are launching new venues of civilisation while facing significant security risks in becoming more secure and resilient. Customers trust us to achieve their business goals, not merely address gaps someone else has to identify first.

If this is a challenge you’re up to, let's talk!