Director of Engineering, Threat Research
Royper Royco LLC
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Job summary
Horizon3 is seeking a Director of Engineering, Threat Research, to lead the teams behind NodeZero Rapid Response and Threat Hunting, turning security signals into fast, safe, customer-specific validation.
You will build follow-the-sun research org, scale cross-region teams, and partner with Product, Design, and engineering to deliver measurable outcomes, while maintaining high standards for safety and reliability.
Qualifications
- Significant experience leading software engineering teams that build customer-facing products, ideally in cybersecurity 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 a portfolio, translating customer and business priorities into focused roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
- Experience building or scaling distributed teams and operational coverage across regions and time zones; ability to establish sustainable 24/7 operating practices.
- Strong technical judgment in software architecture, automation, data systems, and production operations, with the ability to engage credibly with engineers and researchers.
- Experience taking technically complex capabilities from research, prototype, or concept through reliable production delivery and ongoing improvement.
- A customer-oriented product mindset and sound judgment balancing innovation, speed, coverage, reliability, safety, 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, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Responsibilities
- Lead the engineering organizations for Rapid Response and Threat Hunting, setting ownership, goals, and measurable outcomes.
- Define a coherent engineering strategy and roadmap aligned to customer needs and product priorities.
- Build leadership and succession structures, coaching managers and senior contributors.
- Own organizational health: talent planning, feedback, performance, retention, and development.
- Establish operating mechanisms to visualize priorities, delivery, dependencies, quality, and risks.
- Foster an inclusive, high-standard culture with technical rigor and accountability.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
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.
As Director of Engineering, Threat Research, you’ll lead the engineering teams behind NodeZero Rapid Response and Threat Hunting products. Rapid Response turns emerging vulnerability and threat signals into fast, safe, customer-specific validation, helping customers understand what is exploitable in their environments and what to do next. Threat Hunting helps customers investigate whether the attack paths NodeZero discovered were already used: who got in, where they moved, and what they did.
Location: Remote (US), leading distributed teams across the US, Europe and Asia
- Lead and develop the engineering organizations for Rapid Response and Threat Hunting, setting clear ownership, goals, operating expectations, and measurable outcomes.
- Define a coherent engineering strategy and roadmap that connect customer needs, product priorities, security research, and durable engineering investments across both teams.
- Build the leadership structure required to scale, including hiring, coaching, and developing engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors.
- Own organizational health: talent planning, career development, timely feedback, performance, retention, and succession planning.
- Establish operating mechanisms that make priorities, delivery, capacity, dependencies, quality, and risks visible without adding unnecessary process.
- Foster an inclusive, psychologically safe culture with high standards for technical rigor, accountability, collaboration, and learning.
- Lead the engineering strategy for Rapid Response, taking on competitors in the industry and building a superior experience.
- Enable your teams to build automation and AI-assisted research workflows that accelerate analysis and test development while preserving expert judgment, verification, and appropriate safety controls.
- Partner with Product, Design and other Engineering teams to connect asset and exposure context, technology fingerprints, patch information, and other relevant signals to timely, precise customer notifications.
- Build and lead a follow-the-sun vulnerability research organization with sub-teams located in Europe and Asia, creating continuous coverage for Rapid Response.
- Recruit and develop specialized vulnerability researchers and leaders across regions; create clear onboarding, career paths, knowledge-sharing practices, and succession plans.
- Design the staffing model, regional ownership, handoffs, escalation paths, shared queues, and playbooks needed for dependable round-the-clock execution.
- Lead the engineering direction for NodeZero Threat Hunting, including the agent and product capabilities that help customers understand access, movement, and impact: who got in, where they went, and what they did.
- Partner with Product, Design, and technical leaders to turn threat-hunting, SOC, and incident-response needs into scalable investigation workflows and customer-facing capabilities.
- Guide engineering approaches for using relevant security telemetry, attack context, detection logic, and data integrations to produce useful, explainable investigative results.
- Establish quality, reliability, observability, and evaluation practices that help customers trust the evidence and act on findings.
- Ensure Threat Hunting fits coherently into the NodeZero experience and customer security workflows, including appropriate APIs and integrations.
- Partner with Product and leaders across Engineering, Platform, Data, Marketing, Customer Success, Sales, and Channel to translate ambiguous opportunities into sequenced plans with explicit outcomes and ownership.
- Drive complex, cross-team initiatives from discovery through production, surfacing dependencies and risks early and aligning stakeholders on tradeoffs and decisions.
- Maintain technical judgment across software architecture, research automation, data-intensive systems, product quality, and operational readiness without 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, product behavior, research outcomes, and field signals to assess impact and continuously improve the organization’s work.
- Help teams communicate emerging-threat findings and product capabilities clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Significant experience leading software engineering teams that build customer-facing products, ideally in cybersecurity 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 a portfolio, translating customer and business priorities into focused roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
- Experience building or scaling distributed teams and operational coverage across regions and time zones; ability to establish sustainable 24/7 operating practices.
- Strong technical judgment in software architecture, automation, data systems, and production operations, with the ability to engage credibly with engineers and researchers.
- Experience taking technically complex capabilities from research, prototype, or concept through reliable production delivery and ongoing improvement.
- A customer-oriented product mindset and sound judgment balancing innovation, speed, coverage, reliability, safety, 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, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with production software engineering and at least one modern programming language such as Python, Go, TypeScript, or a comparable language.
- Understanding of engineering practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident response, and operational readiness.
- Ability to evaluate technical designs and establish quality controls for security-sensitive, customer-facing systems.
- Deep practical experience in at least one relevant discipline—such as vulnerability research, exploitability analysis, threat hunting, incident response, or detection engineering—and the
- Familiarity with SOC, threat-hunting, or incident-response workflows; security telemetry; attack techniques; and frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
- Direct leadership experience in vulnerability research, exploit development, threat intelligence, threat hunting, incident response, or security product engineering.
- Experience building or operating AI/LLM-assisted research, analysis, or security workflows, including evaluation and verification practices.
- Experience building follow-the-sun teams or leading global, time-sensitive operations.
- Contributions to vulnerability research, published advisories, open-source tooling, technical publications, or conference talks.
- Familiarity with reverse engineering or languages such as C, C++, Rust, or Assembly.
- Experience working with cloud environments and large-scale software products.
Horizon3 is a remote-first company, and this role may require up to 15% travel to support team, customer, and company needs.
- 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.
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 [or Total On-Target Compensation]: $272,425 - $320,500 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.
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.
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.
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.
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