Director of Engineering, Webapp & AI Attack

Job description

**Get to Know Us** Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find and fix and verify exploitable attack vectors before criminals exploit them. Our flagship product, the NodeZeroTM platform, delivers production-safe autonomous pentests and other key assessment operations that scale across the largest internal, external, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments. NodeZero has been adopted by organizations of all sizes, from small educational institutions to government agencies and Global 100 enterprises. It is used by ITOps/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs. We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools, false positives resulting in alert fatigue, blind spots, "checkbox” security culture, cybersecurity skills shortage, and the long lead time and expense of hiring outside consultants. Collectively, we are a team of learn it alls, committed to a culture of respect, collaboration, ownership, and results. ## **What You’ll Do** As Director of Engineering for Webapp and AI Attack, you’ll set direction and lead the teams that turn Webapp and AI related offensive security expertise into dependable, customer-facing NodeZero capabilities. You’ll own the strategy, execution, and organizational health of this portfolio, partnering with engineering managers, technical leaders, Product, Platform, and customer-facing teams. You’ll guide capabilities from discovery and research through productization and ongoing operation. That includes improving how NodeZero maps and tests modern web applications, and building responsible, repeatable ways to assess AI-enabled and agentic systems. This is a people and portfolio leadership role: you’ll maintain enough technical depth to shape decisions and raise the quality bar while enabling teams and technical leaders to own implementation. ## **Key Responsibilities** ### **Organization Leadership & Strategy** - Lead and develop the Webapp and AI Attack engineering teams, setting clear ownership, goals, and expectations across the portfolio. - Define a coherent strategy and roadmap that connect customer needs, product priorities, offensive research, and durable engineering investments. - Build an effective leadership structure as the organization grows; hire, coach, and develop engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors. - Set operating mechanisms that make outcomes, progress, capacity, quality, dependencies, and risks visible without adding unnecessary process. - Own the health and performance of the organization, including talent planning, career development, timely feedback, accountability, and succession planning. - Foster an inclusive, psychologically safe environment where teams can raise risks, learn from failures, and do their best work. ### **Webapp Attack Capabilities** - Set direction for NodeZero’s web application attack portfolio, spanning application discovery, crawling and browser automation, authentication and session handling, attack coverage, and the feedback between discovery and testing. - Ensure the platform can reliably map pages, forms, APIs, parameters, and authentication surfaces across modern applications—including JavaScript-heavy single-page applications and complex user flows. - Partner with technical leaders to improve attack coverage, framework breadth, and the quality of the application context available to downstream testing. - Establish benchmarks, regression practices, and production signals that reveal coverage gaps and prevent quality from silently degrading as applications and frameworks evolve. - Use customer feedback, production behavior, and missed opportunities to prioritize improvements and close the loop between discovery, testing, and customer outcomes. ### **AI Attack Capabilities** - Set the strategy for turning AI/LLM and agentic-system security research into safe, reliable, repeatable attack capabilities in NodeZero—not one-off demonstrations or manual-only workflows. - Guide teams in assessing AI applications and infrastructure, including trust boundaries, permissions, tool use, data sources, model-serving and retrieval architectures, and enterprise deployment patterns. - Help teams evaluate and productize relevant attack classes, such as prompt injection, unsafe tool use, and AI supply-chain or deployment risks, with appropriate safeguards and clear customer value. - Establish quality standards for testing, evaluation, reliability, observability, cost management, and operational readiness in AI-powered offensive workflows. - Maintain a strong connection to the evolving AI security landscape and help the organization distinguish durable customer needs from short-lived trends. ### **Product, Delivery & Technical Leadership** - Partner with Product and leaders across Engineering, Platform, and customer-facing functions to translate ambiguous opportunities into sequenced plans with explicit outcomes and ownership. - Make and communicate tradeoffs across customer impact, speed, coverage, reliability, safety, cost, and long-term maintainability. - Drive complex, cross-team initiatives from planning through production, identifying dependencies and risks early and aligning stakeholders on decisions and changes. - Maintain sufficient technical depth to evaluate architecture, system health, and engineering quality; partner with senior ICs rather than becoming a day-to-day decision bottleneck. - Ensure strong engineering practices across design, implementation, testing, release, monitoring, incident response, and learning from production issues. - Use customer feedback and product and engineering signals to assess results and continuously improve how the organization delivers. ## **What You’ll Bring** - Significant experience leading software engineering teams that build customer-facing products, ideally in cybersecurity, security testing, or another technically complex SaaS domain. - Experience leading multiple teams and developing managers and senior technical leaders, with a track record of building accountable, high-performing organizations. - Demonstrated ability to set strategy and deliver across multiple teams, translating business and customer priorities into focused roadmaps and measurable outcomes. - Strong technical judgment in software architecture, automation, distributed systems, and production operations; able to engage credibly with engineers and technical leaders. - Experience taking complex capabilities from early research or concept through reliable production delivery and ongoing improvement. - A customer-oriented product mindset and sound judgment balancing innovation, coverage, reliability, safety, delivery speed, and maintainability. - Ability to build effective partnerships across Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams, resolve misalignment, and communicate decisions and risks clearly. - A demonstrated commitment to coaching, clear performance feedback, inclusive leadership, and healthy team culture. - Excellent written, verbal, and analytical communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical choices to varied audiences. - A high degree of initiative, ownership, and accountability; comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with ambiguity. - Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. ## **Technical & Domain Experience** - Familiarity with offensive security, web application penetration testing, vulnerability research, attack automation, or building security products. - Working knowledge of modern web application architecture, HTTP, authentication and session flows, APIs, browser automation, and the challenges of testing real-world applications at scale. - Familiarity with AI/LLM and agentic-system security, including trust boundaries, tool-use risks, and approaches to evaluating AI-enabled systems. - Experience with cloud software and production platforms, and fluency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, TypeScript, Go, or a comparable language. - Understanding of engineering practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident response, and operational readiness. ## **Bonus Qualifications** - Direct leadership experience across both web application security and AI/LLM security; deep expertise in one area paired with the ability to build strong technical leadership in the other is also valuable. - Experience with web crawling, spidering, browser automation, application discovery, or authentication technologies such as SSO, SAML, or OIDC. - Experience shipping AI/LLM security capabilities, building agentic workflows, or applying frameworks such as OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications or MITRE ATLAS. - Contributions to security research, open-source tooling, technical publications, conference talks, or other work that advances the field. - Experience with cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP; graph or relational databases such as Neo4j or PostgreSQL; or offensive security certifications such as OSCP, OSEP, or OSWE. ## **Travel Required** We are a remote-first company, and this role may require up to 15% travel to be successful. ## **Compensation and Values** At Horizon3, we believe that our people are our greatest asset, and our compensation philosophy reflects this core value. We are committed to fostering an environment where all employees feel valued, respected, and rewarded for their contributions. Our compensation structure is designed to be fair, competitive, and transparent, ensuring that every team member is recognized and compensated equitably across roles, levels, and locations. In accordance with various State’s transparency regulations, we provide the following salary range information for this position: - The base salary range for this position is **$290,000-$340,000**. The exact salary will be determined based on the selected candidate’s location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills. - Additional compensation: All full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options. **Perks of Horizon3** - Inclusive Team: We value diversity and promote an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive. - Growth Opportunities: Be part of a dynamic and growing team with numerous career development opportunities. - Innovative Culture: Work in a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. - Hybrid & Remote Work: We embrace a mix of remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location, including our Chicago office, where some roles require regular in-office presence. - Competitive Compensation: We offer competitive salary, equity and benefits. Our benefits include health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family, a flexible vacation policy, and generous parental leave. **You Belong Here** Horizon3 is not just an equal opportunity employer - we are a community that values diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental principles of our culture and success. We are dedicated to fostering a workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected, regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, hair length or any other legally protected status by law. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we strive to attract, develop, and retain a workforce that reflects the varied communities we serve. We believe that diverse perspectives drive innovation and strengthen our ability to create cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions. At Horizon3, every team member is valued and supported in an environment that encourages personal and professional growth. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and experiences, and we encourage all qualified individuals to apply. Come be a part of Horizon3, where your unique contributions are recognized, and your potential is limitless. **Other Duties** Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice. **Application Note** In any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.