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Salary: USD 270,000 - 365,000 / annual
Horizon3.ai is a fast-growing remote cybersecurity company that enables organizations to proactively find, fix, and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. The flagship product, NodeZero, delivers production-safe autonomous pentests and assessment operations that scale across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. The company was founded by a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and cybersecurity practitioners.
As Senior Director of Engineering for Precision Defense, you will set engineering direction and build the organization that transforms NodeZero's offensive capabilities into proactive, actionable defense. You will lead across three connected pillars: Tripwires and Deception, Security Controls Validation, and Blue Team Agents. These teams help customers design their defenses, test whether they work, and detect attacker activity that makes it past the perimeter.
You will translate the Precision Defense charter into an executable engineering strategy, scale teams and leadership, and deliver dependable capabilities across defensive engineering, integrations, and AI-enabled workflows. You will partner closely with Product, leaders across Engineering, and the broader company to focus investment, manage dependencies, and deliver customer outcomes.
Key responsibilities include: leading and scaling the Precision Defense engineering organization; turning the organization's charter into clear technical strategy, operating model, and sequenced roadmap; building an effective leadership structure as the organization grows, developing engineering managers, technical leads, and senior individual contributors; establishing goals and operating mechanisms that make progress, quality, staffing needs, and risks visible; partnering with technical leads on architecture and design; prioritizing work across emerging-threat response, offensive engineering, deception, security-control validation, and agent-driven remediation; translating ambiguous goals into focused plans with explicit scope and measurable outcomes; ensuring engineering investment supports a coherent customer experience; surfacing tradeoffs early and communicating decisions clearly; and working closely with Product and customer-facing teams to connect technical plans to customer needs.
Travel: up to 15% required.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Significant experience leading SaaS or cloud service engineering organizations that deliver complex software products, including scaling teams through managers and technical leaders
- Track record setting engineering strategy and delivering across multiple teams or product areas in a fast-moving environment
- Strong technical judgment in cloud software, distributed systems, platform engineering, or similarly complex production environments, with ability to engage credibly in architecture and design discussions
- Experience with AI- or agent-enabled products in production; sound judgment about their limitations, verification, and safe operation is essential
- Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous objectives into sequenced execution, manage scope and dependencies, and communicate risks and tradeoffs clearly
- Experience partnering closely with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to align engineering investment with customer and business outcomes
- People-first leadership approach with experience hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing teams across disciplines
- Excellent written and verbal communication, sound judgment, and high degree of ownership and accountability
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
NICE TO HAVE:
- Familiarity with security engineering, offensive security, vulnerability response, detection, or security-control validation
- Experience leading engineering in cybersecurity, penetration testing, security operations, or defensive security products
- Background spanning offensive security and defensive control platforms (endpoint, identity, network, or data security)
- Experience building agent platforms or product workflows that connect detection, decision-making, and verified remediation
- Experience scaling a product organization from early-stage team into multiple delivery teams
- Experience building strategic technical partnerships or working with managed security service providers (MSSPs)
