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Salary: USD 242,250 - 275,000 / 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.
You will lead the Database Platform team, the engineering team responsible for the data infrastructure underpinning every NodeZero pentest, finding, and report. NodeZero operates at massive scale: millions of discovered assets, tens of millions of vulnerability findings, and audit-critical data that customers rely on for risk remediation. The Database Platform team owns the design, operation, and reliability of the core data layer—currently PostgreSQL as the primary store and Neo4j for the asset graph, with time-series and analytical stores planned as data volume and use cases grow.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading a team of ~8 engineers, including a Principal Engineer, and building it to full capacity
- Establishing database engineering norms and a culture of ownership for engineers responsible for the most critical data layer
- Partnering with the Principal Engineer to define technical direction for the data platform: schema design standards, query patterns, migration strategies, and scalability principles
- Owning SLOs for database availability, query latency, and data integrity across production environments
- Driving oncall maturity and runbook quality
- Establishing schema review processes and data modeling standards to ensure clean evolution of the data model
- Collaborating with Data Ingestion, Security Research, and API Platform teams on data contracts, API design, and pipeline dependencies
- Acting as a Product Owner, translating data platform needs into a clear, prioritized engineering roadmap
The role requires up to 5% travel. Horizon3 is fully remote with a Chicago office; this position is fully remote.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Demonstrated experience leading teams that design, scale, and operate relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and hybrid data stores (graph, time-series, or document) in production at scale
- Experience defining schema migration strategies for high-velocity production environments with zero-downtime requirements
- Experience with multi-tenant data architectures: customer data isolation, row-level security, and data residency concerns
- Strong understanding of database performance: query optimization, indexing strategies, EXPLAIN analysis, and connection pooling
- Experience building or significantly growing an engineering team, including hiring, onboarding, and establishing engineering norms for data-intensive systems
- Proven ability to define and instill engineering culture: rigorous schema review, data integrity standards, operational runbooks, and oncall rotation
- Drives high-impact architecture decisions rigorously—requires design documents, runs structured reviews, builds consensus across platform teams
- Ability to partner effectively with a Principal Engineer and leverage their technical leadership without diminishing team ownership
- Proficiency in Go, Python, or SQL (deep expertise)
- Production experience with PostgreSQL at scale: partitioning, logical replication, pg_bouncer/pgpool, read replicas
- Experience with AWS data services: RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, or equivalent
- Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) or time-series stores (TimescaleDB, InfluxDB) is a strong plus
- Kubernetes and containerized database operations—stateful workload management
Nice to haves: Background in cybersecurity data, threat intelligence feeds, or vulnerability databases; experience with data platform compliance (SOC 2, FedRAMP, GDPR/CCPA); familiarity with analytical query patterns (BI tooling, OLAP workloads, customer-facing analytics); experience operating databases in multi-region or active-active configurations.
