Field CTO

Role Purpose & Impact

The Field CTO leads and grows Druva's global SME team while serving as our most senior technical evangelist in the field. This leader connects our workload expertise to the security and data-resilience story spanning identity security, data lifecycle management, and data loss prevention (DLP), and carries that story to customers, partners, and the market to drive pipeline growth and conversion.

The role is both a people leader and a market-facing authority: responsible for building a security- and identity-fluent SME organization, serving as Druva's hands-on identity expert in the field, elevating Druva's brand against the data-protection and cyber-resilience field (Rubrik, Veritas/Cohesity, Commvault), and turning technical credibility into commercial outcomes on our largest, most strategic accounts.

What You'll Do

• Engage: Drive security and identity strategy conversations with top customers or prospects and articulate Druva's security and identity resilience value proposition
• Build Trust: Leverage executive presence & credibility to build trusted relationships with C-level technology peers (CIO, CISO, CTO, CDO)
• Lead and Develop the SME Team: Manage Druva's global SME team, setting priorities, coaching, and raising the team's security fluency
• Be the Identity SME: Serve as Druva's senior identity subject matter expert. Lead identity-focused customer conversations, architecture reviews, and technical wins, and act as the escalation point for the SME team and Sales Engineering on IdP and directory-related questions (Entra ID, Active Directory, Okta)
• Build Identity Capability: Coach SMEs on identity concepts, attack paths, and recovery scenarios so identity fluency scales beyond one person
• Enable security thought leadership: help build written or recorded collateral and speak at industry events to proactively build Druva's security and identity brand
• Be Voice of Customer: Understand customers' security and identity pain points across industry segments/verticals and funnel insight into internal product and strategy prioritization processes
• Deeply engage with Product, Marketing and Sales teams to define messaging & outreach strategies targeting security and identity personas
• Demonstrate empathy towards customers' mission and security objectives
• Collaborate on hosting security-focused Customer Advisory board (CAB) engagements, yearly Druva security conference and other such customer events
• Engage with Industry analysts and evangelize Druva's security and identity resilience value proposition
• Drive internal security field-education initiatives to enable nuanced security understanding around attacks, attacker TTPs and attacker mindsets, including identity-based attacks such as credential theft, privilege escalation, and directory compromise
• Understand the competitive landscape and help position Druva product differentiation
• Engage with Industry Groups focused on our areas of interest and contribute back to the community
• Engage with our channel partners on joint GTM initiatives

What Makes You a Great Fit

• 12+ years of direct on the ground cyber security practitioner experience
• Deep expertise in identity and access management, including hands-on experience with identity providers (IdPs) such as Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD), Active Directory, and Okta
• Strong working knowledge of identity security (IDS) and identity threat detection and response (ITDR): how identity systems are attacked, hardened, monitored, and recovered
• Understanding of identity-based attack techniques and how they map to MITRE ATT&CK (credential theft, Kerberoasting, Golden Ticket, DCSync, token theft, MFA bypass, privilege escalation), and of how to recover a compromised directory or IdP after a breach
• Familiarity with identity architecture and standards: SSO, MFA, federation (SAML, OIDC, OAuth), SCIM provisioning, privileged access management, and hybrid and cloud identity models
• Experience leading or mentoring technical teams, including coaching specialists who are not yet deep in a domain, and acting as the subject matter expert for that team
• Strong and comprehensive understanding of Forensics and Recovery processes
• Experience defending, responding or recovering from Ransomware incidents is huge plus
• Past experience running IR engagements, SOC and/or Crisis management teams is a plus
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills, including ability to present to internal and external executive level stakeholders
• Understanding of how real world breaches happen and protection measures required to be resilient
• Ability to distill complex security topics to communicate to non-technical audiences
• Familiarity with the MITRE ATT&CK Framework, Threat Actor groups and their TTPs
• Knowledge of Public Cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), SaaS Architectures and their specific security implications
• Familiarity of nuanced differences in security practices across Industry segments and verticals
• Knowledge of security foundations across Data Security, Security architecture and maturity, ZTNA, SASE, EDR/MDR, BCP/DR
• SaaS platform / data-protection architecture credibility
• Experience influencing enterprise buying decisions in a presales, advisory, or evangelist capacity
• Awareness of Sales and Marketing processes

What Success Looks Like in the Role

• First 3 months: ramp on the Resilience Cloud platform, Identity Resilience, and Dru MetaGraph positioning; complete executive intros on a defined set of ICP Tier 1/2 strategic accounts; deliver 1 field-enablement session on attacker TTPs / ransomware recovery; assess the SME team's identity knowledge gaps and set a coaching plan.
• First 6 months: measurably lift technical-win coverage on strategic New-Business opportunities the role engages; lead the technical win on identity-led opportunities and deliver an identity enablement program for the SME team; drive at least one security-focused CAB / customer event; establish the voice-of-customer feedback loop into Product with recurring cadence.
• First 12 months: demonstrable impact on POC-to-win conversion and reduction of forecasted deals with no tech win in the engaged account set; SME team able to independently handle core identity discovery and demo scenarios, with the Field CTO as escalation; recognized external thought-leadership footprint (analyst engagements, speaking, published collateral); repeatable competitive-displacement narrative the broader SE field can reuse.

What We Offer

• The pay range for this position is expected to be between $346,000 and $484,667/year; however, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized, non-discriminatory factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
• The total compensation package for this position may also include other incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions, and equity.

Additionally, full-time employees are eligible to participate in our comprehensive benefits program, including health and wellness benefits, 401(k) retirement plan, life and disability insurance coverages, and other benefits the Company may offer from time to time.