Senior Director, Engineering, Precision Defense

horizon3ai; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company building NodeZero platform to enable proactive defense and autonomous pentests. This role leads the Precision Defense engineering org, shaping strategy across three pillars and delivering integrated, AI-enabled workflows.

You will partner with Product and senior leaders to scale teams, define a sequenced roadmap, and ensure a durable, secure platform that translates customer needs into reliable outcomes.

Qualifications

• Experience leading SaaS or cloud service engineering orgs delivering complex software products.
• Proven track record setting engineering strategy and delivering across multiple teams or product areas.
• Strong technical judgment in cloud software, distributed systems, platform engineering, or similar environments.
• Experience with AI- or agent-enabled products in production is valuable.
• Ability to turn ambiguous objectives into sequenced execution and manage scope.
• Experience partnering with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to align investment with outcomes.
• People-first leadership with experience hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Lead and scale the Precision Defense engineering organization.
• Turn the organization’s charter into a clear technical strategy, operating model, and roadmap.
• Build leadership and governance across teams with clear ownership and accountability.
• Partner with Product and engineering leaders to prioritize work across defense, deception, validation, and remediation.
• Translate goals into explicit scope and measurable outcomes, managing cross‑team dependencies.
• Ensure engineering investments deliver a coherent customer experience and reliable defense capabilities.

Skills

SaaS leadership

Engineering strategy

Cloud/distributed systems

AI-enabled products

Execution planning

Cross-functional collaboration

People leadership

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Job description

Get to Know Us

Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company dedicated to the mission of enabling organizations to proactively find, 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 IT Ops/SecOps teams, consulting pentesters, and MSSPs and MSPs.

We are a fusion of former U.S. Special Operations cyber operators, startup engineers & operators, and formerly frustrated cybersecurity practitioners. We're committed to helping solve our common security problems: ineffective security tools and 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 Senior Director of Engineering for Precision Defense, you'll set engineering direction and build the organization that turns NodeZero's offensive capabilities into proactive, actionable defense. You will lead across three connected pillars: Tripwires and Deception, Security Controls Validation, and Blue Team Agents. Together, these teams help customers design their defenses, test whether they work, and detect attacker activity that makes it past the perimeter.

You'll translate the Precision Defense charter into an executable engineering strategy, scale teams and leadership, and deliver dependable capabilities across defensive engineering, integrations, and AI-enabled workflows. You'll partner closely with Product, leaders across Engineering and the company to focus investment, manage dependencies, and deliver customer outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Organization Leadership & Strategy

• Lead and scale the Precision Defense engineering organization
• Turn the organization's charter into a clear technical strategy, operating model, and sequenced roadmap, balancing near-term customer value with durable platform and team foundations.
• Build an effective leadership structure as the organization grows, developing engineering managers, technical leads, and senior individual contributors with clear ownership and accountability.
• Establish goals and operating mechanisms that make progress, quality, staffing needs, and risks visible across multiple teams.
• Partner with technical leads on architecture and design, bringing sufficient depth to evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and ensure systems can evolve as the portfolio expands.

Product & Portfolio Execution

• Partner with Product and engineering leaders to prioritize work across emerging-threat response, offensive engineering, deception, security-control validation, and agent-driven remediation.
• Translate ambiguous goals into focused plans with explicit scope, measurable outcomes, and well-managed cross-team dependencies.
• Ensure engineering investment supports a coherent customer experience-from understanding exposure and testing defenses to taking safe, practical action.
• Surface tradeoffs early, communicate decisions clearly, and protect teams from competing priorities that would undermine delivery or quality.
• Work closely with Product, the broader NodeZero engineering organization, and customer-facing teams to connect technical plans to customer needs and company priorities.

What You'll Bring

• Significant experience leading SaaS or cloud service engineering organizations that deliver complex software products, including scaling teams through managers and technical leaders.
• A track record setting engineering strategy and delivering across multiple teams or product areas in a fast-moving environment.
• Strong technical judgment in cloud software, distributed systems, platform engineering, or similarly complex production environments-and the ability to engage credibly in architecture and design discussions.
• Experience with AI- or agent-enabled products in production is valuable; sound judgment about their limitations, verification, and safe operation is essential.
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous objectives into sequenced execution, manage scope and dependencies, and communicate risks and tradeoffs clearly.
• Experience partnering closely with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to align engineering investment with customer and business outcomes.
• A people-first leadership approach, with experience hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing teams across disciplines.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, sound judgment, and a high degree of ownership and accountability.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, o