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Salary: USD 199,750 - 270,000 / annual
Horizon3.ai is a fast-growing cybersecurity company building NodeZero, an autonomous pentesting platform used by organizations ranging from educational institutions to Global 100 enterprises. The platform helps teams proactively find, fix, and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them.
You will join as Staff Developer Experience Engineer, a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for shaping how Horizon3 engineers build, test, release, and operate software. The Developer Experience team owns the foundations connecting local development to production delivery: developer tooling, CI/CD, build systems, container base images, artifact promotion, release gates, and approved agentic-development workflows.
Key responsibilities include:
**Developer Platform Strategy, Delivery & Operations**
- Define architecture and roadmap for local development, repository tooling, CI/CD, build systems, and release workflows
- Lead high-impact initiatives across engineering to reduce manual coordination and standardize the path from code change to production
- Build reusable GitLab CI/CD templates, runner capabilities, developer workflows, test gates, artifact promotion, release manifests, and rollback paths
- Establish sustainable practices for shared container images, build performance, reproducibility, scanning, signing, provenance, and supply-chain security
- Improve developer workflow and delivery observability through useful measures of setup time, pipeline health, release performance, and adoption
- Partner with Platform, Security, QA, and feature teams to make delivery foundations reliable, secure, and easy to consume
**Technical Leadership & Enablement**
- Establish standards and paved paths for developer workflows, build and release engineering, and approved AI-assisted development
- Design safe agentic-development workflows that integrate with code review, testing, scanning, permissions, auditability, and security requirements
- Turn repeated developer friction into reusable tooling, templates, documentation, migration guidance, and runbooks
- Mentor engineers, develop technical owners, and raise the engineering bar across Developer Experience and Horizon3
- Communicate complex technical decisions clearly and build alignment across Platform, Application Engineering, Data Engineering, Security, QA, Product, and Program Management
- Participate in design reviews, operational reviews, incident response, and continuous improvement
The Developer Experience stack includes GitLab CI/CD with private runner fleets, Docker/OCI images, Kubernetes/EKS, AWS, Go, Python, TypeScript, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, and approved AI coding tools like Claude Code.
Success looks like: engineering teams adopting clear, reliable paved paths from local development through production; shared CI/CD, build, and release capabilities reducing friction; validated artifacts moving predictably through environments; secure, current, traceable base images and workflows; approved AI-assisted workflows improving productivity without bypassing review or security; and Developer Experience having clear standards, strong adoption, measurable outcomes, and multiple technical owners.
Occasional travel may be required for company onsite meetings and team collaboration.
**REQUIREMENTS**
Required Qualifications:
- 8+ years of experience in Developer Experience, Developer Productivity, Build/Release Engineering, Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial tooling and delivery ownership
- Deep experience designing and operating CI/CD systems, preferably GitLab CI/CD and self-hosted runners
- Experience with container builds, Docker or OCI images, artifact repositories, and reproducible builds
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes-based development or delivery workflows
- Experience implementing automated tests, security checks, release gates, progressive delivery, and rollback
- Proficiency in Go and Python for automation, developer tooling, or platform services
- Strong understanding of software supply-chain security, dependencies, image vulnerabilities, provenance, secrets, and least privilege
- Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams and driving adoption of shared capabilities
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without relying on formal authority
Preferred Qualifications:
- Internal developer platform, paved-road, service-template, or developer-portal experience
- Shared language/runtime base images, image signing, SBOMs, or provenance-control experience
- GitLab Runner fleets, CI optimization, build caching, or multi-repository release-system experience
- Local Kubernetes, dev containers, Docker Compose, Orbstack, Skaffold, ArgoCD, or GitOps experience
- AI-assisted or agentic engineering workflow experience
- OpenTelemetry, Datadog, pipeline telemetry, or developer-productivity metrics experience
- Security-sensitive, regulated, or cybersecurity experience
