Who is Tenable?
Tenable® is the Exposure Management company. Over 40,000 organizations around the globe rely on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk. Our global employees support 65 percent of the Fortune 500, 50 percent of the Global 2000, and large government agencies. Come be part of our journey!
What makes Tenable such a great place to work?
Ask a member of our team and they’ll answer, “Our people!” We work together to build and innovate best-in-class cybersecurity solutions for our customers; all while creating a culture of belonging, respect, and excellence where we can be our best selves. When you’re part of our #OneTenable team, you can expect to partner with some of the most talented and passionate people in the industry, and have the support and resources you need to do work that truly matters. We deliver results that exceed expectations and we win together!
Your Opportunity:
The Office of the CTO (OCTO) is where Tenable’s most forward-looking bets get made. We translate where the market is heading — agentic AI, post-quantum cryptography, AI-driven attacker tradecraft, the next wave of exposure management — into concrete initiatives that move our roadmap and our business.
We are looking for a Chief of Staff to serve as the operating core of the OCTO: the person who gives the team its rhythm, gives the CTO leverage, and gives the rest of the company a clear line of sight into what we’re building and why.
This is not a coordination role. It is a principal-level position for someone who can hold the big picture and the smallest detail in the same breath — who is equally at home in a board prep session, an M&A diligence room, a customer briefing, and a backlog review. You will drive clarity through noise. You will be the main connective tissue between the OCTO and the rest of Tenable. And you will act as a credible proxy for the CTO in high-stakes settings, externally and internally.
Your Role:
Run the OCTO rhythm of business
- Own the operating cadence of the OCTO: leadership staff meetings, business and program reviews, planning cycles, and OKR tracking.
- Monitor progress against commitments. Surface risks, dependencies, and trade-offs early, and drive them to resolution.
- Manage OCTO headcount and budget end-to-end, ensuring the team has the resources it needs to prove feasibility and deliver on the CTO’s priorities.
- Set the pace for research, experimentation, and incubation — moving at startup speed while meeting enterprise-grade standards.
Execute on leadership direction
- Participate in executive forums so you know what’s being decided — then make sure what comes next actually gets done.
- Cascade decisions through the organization. Help the team distinguish the exception from the rule. Surface to the CTO what they need to know before they ask.
- Own briefing, preparation, and follow-through for the CTO across engagements with R&D leadership, the board, and the broader company.
Create leverage on strategic projects
- Own the connective tissue on high-ambiguity, cross-functional initiatives: acquisition integration, new team onboarding, strategic product rollouts, and the projects that don’t fit neatly on anyone else’s roadmap.
- Drive diligence on potential acquisitions, support M&A workstreams, and help shape strategic partnerships and Tenable Ventures activity.
- Act as the CTO’s proxy in high-stakes environments across Tenable and externally — with analysts, investors, customers, and the board.
Act as a sounding board for the CTO and leadership team
- Ask the questions that help people arrive at cleaner answers faster. Have the hard conversations where they need to be had.
- Raise the quality bar across the OCTO — on thinking, on communication, on execution.
- Read the room. Navigate unspoken organizational sensitivities. Exercise absolute discretion around talent and strategy.
Be the voice of the OCTO across Tenable
- Ensure the OCTO’s story is being told internally — with coherence, conviction, and the right level of detail for each audience.
- Own inputs and outputs that connect the OCTO to Product, Marketing, Finance, Sales, and R&D leadership.
- Drive customer and partner engagement alongside the CTO — Customer Advisory Boards, executive briefings, design partner programs. Bring back the signal: what customers are actually asking for, and what should change as a result.
What You'll Need:
- 8–10+ years of experience in product, strategy, business operations, or a Chief of Staff function — ideally in a high-growth or enterprise technology company.
- A track record of running complex cross-functional programs, not just tracking them. You drive outcomes.
- Technical fluency. You don’t need to write the code, but you must be able to follow the architecture conversation and ask the product and engineering leaders the right questions.
- Exceptional ability to take ambiguous, high-stakes initiatives and turn them into structure, cadence, and outcomes — without becoming a process bottleneck.
- Influence without authority. Presence and credibility in the room, even when you don’t hold the title. You build trust at every level of the organization.
- Outstanding communication. You can write a crisp executive brief and deliver sharp verbal feedback in the same afternoon. You turn complex data and raw material into something a senior leader can immediately understand and act on.
- High bias for action and comfort with ambiguity. You frame the problem and propose the answer — you don’t wait for one.
- Daily, hands-on use of AI tools as a force multiplier for your work, and a natural drive to raise the AI fluency of the people around you.
Nice to have
- Background in cybersecurity, cloud security, vulnerability management, or exposure management.
- Prior experience inside an Office of the CTO, a corporate strategy team, or an innovation/incubation function at a public technology company.
- Commercial and financial fluency — comfort with budgets, business cases, and M&A diligence fundamentals.
- Exposure to investor relations, analyst relations, or partnership and business development work at the executive level.
If you’ve reached this point in the job description and feel you’re still not sure if you should apply — just do it. We know there are no perfect candidates. What matters is that this is work you can be genuinely passionate about. We’re #OneTenable, which means however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, we encourage you to apply.
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We’re committed to promoting Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) at Tenable - through all equal employment opportunity laws and regulations at the international, federal, state and local levels. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please contact Recruiting@Tenable.com for further assistance.
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