What You'll Do

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Data Processing Platform team - the group responsible for how NodeZero turns raw pentest telemetry into the findings, reports, and insights our customers act on.

As Horizon3 has grown in both customer count and customer size, pentest execution and data processing times scaled as well. Your team is taking on one of the most impactful architectural changes in Horizon3's history: reworking pentest data processing from a batch system into a real-time, event-driven microservice architecture. The goal is to make Horizon3 best-in-class for enterprise pentests at scale - handling hundreds of thousands of hosts and streaming findings as they're discovered. Customers will go from waiting weeks for insights to getting them in hours, fundamentally transforming how the entire product suite feels to use.

This work combines platform engineering to build the infrastructure foundation with cybersecurity domain understanding to translate years of batch-centric business logic into real-time processing.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and grow a team of backend and platform engineers migrating post-op processing from a batch system to a real-time, event-driven architecture.
• Partner with Product, Attack Engineering, and adjacent Platform teams to sequence the rework so customer value ships continuously rather than as one big-bang cutover.
• Work with senior engineers on the team to shape the technical direction: event streaming, stream processing, storage, schema evolution, and replayable processing.
• Invest in operational excellence - SLOs, observability, on-call, and incident response - as this system becomes central to every pentest Horizon3 runs.
• Help translate existing batch-era logic (finding enrichment, attack path analysis, reporting) into streaming-friendly designs without regressing fidelity.
• Recruit, mentor, and retain engineers who care about both distributed systems craft and the security domain.
• 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 meaty 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.

Nice to have:

• Exposure to event-driven architectures or streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, Flink, or similar).
• Background in cybersecurity, pentesting, or vulnerability management.
• Familiarity with Python and/or Go.

Perks of Horizon3.ai

• 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: $260,000 - $280,000 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.

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

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