Federal Security Engineering Lead (FedRAMP/IL4/IL5)

NightDragon Acquisition Corp.; United States; Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Inclusive team

Growth opportunities

Hybrid & remote work

Competitive compensation

Equity and benefits

Job summary

Horizon3 is expanding its Federal security program and seeks a Federal Security Engineering Manager to build and lead a compliant security team for FedRAMP and IL4/IL5 environments. You will recruit, define roles, mentor engineers, and drive cloud security architecture, detection, and incident response for federal workloads.

You will collaborate with engineering to embed security into the SDLC, automate controls via IaC, and guide the team through threat modeling, risk assessments, and audits.

Qualifications

• U.S. citizenship and the ability to meet DoD personnel security requirements for IL4/IL5 environments.
• 8+ years of experience in cybersecurity, including 5+ years in cloud security (AWS strongly preferred).
• 3+ years of experience managing or technically leading security engineers.
• Experience building and scaling a security engineering team.
• Working knowledge of FedRAMP High and DoD IL4/IL5 requirements shaping cloud architecture, logging, and incident response.
• Familiarity with SIEM and detection engineering concepts and SOC operating models.
• Excellent written and verbal communication to explain risk to engineers, executives, and government stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the Federal Security Engineering Team across FedRAMP/IL4/IL5 environments.
• Define hiring roadmaps, role profiles, interview loops, and sequencing for federal program scaling.
• Coach engineers with regular 1:1s, set goals, provide feedback, and retain top performers.
• Set priorities and operating rhythms balancing strategic investments with incident response.
• Lead horizontally with commercial and partner teams.
• Define technical direction for securing federal cloud environments, IAM, encryption, logging, and baselines.
• Ensure automated controls meet FedRAMP/DoD requirements via IaC and policy-as-code.
• Review architecture decisions, threat models, and risk assessments for federal deployments.
• Embed security into SDLC/CI/CD pipelines for federal workloads.
• Set standards for identity and access management, least privilege, and federated identity.
• Define vision and roadmap for SIEM, log aggregation, and detection within federal boundary.
• Build SOC for federal environment including on-call structure and documentation.
• Drive automation toward SOAR and AI/ML-assisted triage and response.
• Direct development of detection content aligned to MITRE ATT&CK and purple-team insights.
• Oversee incident response and government customer reporting.

Skills

Team building

Cloud security

FedRAMP/DoD IL4/IL5

SIEM / SOC

MITRE ATT&CK

Leadership & mentoring

Security architecture

Communication with executives/governm

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Cybersecurity/Information Systems

Tools

AWS GovCloud

Kubernetes

Container security

Crossplane

GitLab

ArgoCD

ELK Stack

AWS GuardDuty

Job description

Horizon3 is expanding its Federal security program and seeks a Federal Security Engineering Manager to build and lead a compliant security team for FedRAMP and IL4/IL5 environments. You will recruit, define roles, mentor engineers, and drive cloud security architecture, detection, and incident response for federal workloads.

You will collaborate with engineering to embed security into the SDLC, automate controls via IaC, and guide the team through threat modeling, risk assessments, and audits.