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Salary: USD 225,000 - 265,000 / annual
Horizon3.ai is a fast-growing cybersecurity company building NodeZero, an autonomous penetration testing platform that helps organizations proactively discover and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. The platform is used by ITOps/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and managed security service providers across organizations of all sizes, from educational institutions to Global 100 enterprises.
You will lead the engineering team behind NodeZero Tripwires, a deception technology product that uses intelligent honeypots and honeytokens to detect attackers with minimal false positives. The core challenge is not building decoys—it's knowing where to place them and generating high-signal alerts that defenders can trust.
In this role, you will own the delivery strategy for Tripwires, including decoy and deception development, detection, alerting, and the customer-facing experience. You'll partner closely with Product to sequence the roadmap and expand Tripwires coverage. You'll recruit, mentor, and retain engineers who care about both distributed systems craft and security domain expertise. You'll oversee the design of new tripwire types that are attractive to attackers while remaining indistinguishable from legitimate assets. You'll invest in operational excellence through SLOs, observability, on-call practices, and incident response. You'll establish healthy team practices including design reviews, technical writing, clear API contracts, and durable decision records. You'll also partner with the Attack team to create tight feedback loops so new offensive findings translate into new detection coverage.
This is an opportunity for a manager who enjoys staying close to technical details and wants to grow alongside a team tackling a substantial data platform rebuild.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience managing backend, data, or platform engineering teams with a track record of shipping through the team
- Solid fundamentals in backend and distributed systems: data modeling, API design, queues/streams, and tradeoffs between batch and streaming
- Comfort with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), containers, and observability tooling (Datadog or similar)
- Ability to lead through technical ambiguity—facilitate design discussions, help teams converge, and know when to dig in yourself
- Clear written communication: ability to write roadmaps, design docs, and postmortems that the company can read
- Sense of ownership for how the team operates day-to-day, not just what it ships
- Working knowledge of deception technology: honeypots, honeytokens, canaries
NICE TO HAVE:
- Exposure to event-driven architectures or streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Flink, or similar)
- Understanding of how attackers move through an environment post-compromise: credential access, lateral movement, privilege escalation
- Background in cybersecurity, pentesting, or vulnerability management
- Familiarity with Python and/or Go
