Engineering Manager (Tripwires)

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

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the team behind NodeZero Tripwires. Deception has always been a good idea and a hard problem. Honeypots were too heavy. Honeytokens were too easy to scatter in the wrong places, and defenders drowned in alerts they couldn't trust. The hardest part was never building a decoy. It was knowing where to put it. You'll lead a team, set the technical bar, partner with Product on the roadmap, and work closely with our Attack team to keep tripwire design grounded in current adversary tradecraft. You'll be in design reviews, you'll be the one asking why an alert fired, and you'll own the standard. Signal-to-noise is not a metric for this product. It is the product. In this role, you will:

• Own the delivery strategy for Tripwires: decoy and deception development, detection, alerting, and the customer-facing experience around them.
• Partner closely with Product to sequence the roadmap, and expand Tripwires coverage.
• Recruit, mentor, and retain engineers who care about both distributed systems craft and the security domain.
• Oversee the design of new tripwire types that are attractive to attackers and indistinguishable from legitimate assets.
• Invest in operational excellence; SLOs, observability, on-call, and incident response.
• Partner with the Attack team to create tight feedback loops so new offensive findings translate into new detection coverage.
• Establish healthy team practices: design reviews, technical writing, clear API contracts with neighboring teams, and durable decision records.

This is a good opportunity for a manager who still enjoys being close to the technical details and wants to grow alongside a team tackling a substantial data platform rebuild.

What You'll Bring

• 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 the 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 — you can facilitate a design discussion, help the team converge, and know when to dig in yourself.
• Clear written communication: you can put together a roadmap, a design doc, or a postmortem the rest of the company can read.
• A 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, and privilege escalation.
• Background in cybersecurity, pentesting, or vulnerability management.
• Familiarity with Python and/or Go.

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.

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:

• Base salary range: $225,000 - $265,000 annually. 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.

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, 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.