Senior Manager, Database Platform

Horizon3; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Horizon3 is seeking a senior leader to head the Database Platform team, building and operating the core data layer that underpins NodeZero pentests and analytics. You will shape architecture, enforce data integrity, and drive reliability at scale across production environments.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, own roadmap priorities, and mentor a growing engineering staff to deliver high-impact data capabilities for security research and product initiatives.

Qualifications

• Experience leading teams that design, scale, and operate relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and hybrid data stores (graph, time-series, or document) in production at scale.
• Experience defining schema migration strategies for high-velocity production environments with zero-downtime requirements.
• Experience with multi-tenant data architectures: customer data isolation, row-level security, and data residency concerns.
• Strong understanding of database performance: query optimization, indexing strategies, EXPLAIN analysis, and connection pooling.

Responsibilities

• Hire, mentor, and grow the Database Platform team to full capacity.
• Define technical direction for NodeZero's data platform — schema design standards, query patterns, migration strategies, and scalability principles.
• Own SLOs for database availability, query latency, and data integrity across production environments. Drive oncall maturity and runbook quality.
• Data Modeling & Schema Governance: Establish schema review processes and data modeling standards.
• Cross-team Partnership: Collaborate with Data Ingestion, Security Research, and API Platform teams to align on data contracts, API design, and pipeline dependencies.
• Act as a Product Owner: Translate data platform needs from Security Research and Product into a clear, prioritized engineering roadmap.

Skills

Go

Python

SQL

PostgreSQL

Graph databases

Kubernetes

AWS

TimescaleDB

Neo4j

Tools

pg_bouncer/pgpool

RDS/Aurora

Job description

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

You will lead the Database Platform team — the engineering team responsible for the data infrastructure that underpins every NodeZero pentest, finding, and report. NodeZero operates at scale: millions of discovered assets, tens of millions of vulnerability findings, and audit-critical data that our customers rely on to remediate risk. The Database Platform team owns the design, operation, and reliability of our core data layer — currently PostgreSQL as the primary store and Neo4j for the asset graph, with time-series and analytical stores on the roadmap as NodeZero's data volume and use cases grow. You will lead a team of ~8 engineers including a Principal Engineer, and you will build this team from a strong foundation into a fully staffed, world-class data platform organization.

• Team Building & Culture: Hire, mentor, and grow the Database Platform team to full capacity. Establish database engineering norms and a culture of ownership for engineers who share responsibility for the most critical data layer in our stack.

• Data Architecture: Partner with the Principal Engineer to define the technical direction for NodeZero's data platform — schema design standards, query patterns, migration strategies, and scalability principles.

• Reliability & Operations: Own SLOs for database availability, query latency, and data integrity across production environments. Drive oncall maturity and runbook quality.

• Data Modeling & Schema Governance: Establish schema review processes and data modeling standards. Ensure NodeZero's data model evolves cleanly as new pentest capabilities ship.

• Cross-team Partnership: Collaborate with Data Ingestion, Security Research, and API Platform teams to align on data contracts, API design, and pipeline dependencies.

• Act as a Product Owner: Translate data platform needs from Security Research and Product into a clear, prioritized engineering roadmap.

What You'll Bring

Data Platform Leadership & Architecture

• Demonstrated experience leading teams that design, scale, and operate relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and hybrid data stores (graph, time-series, or document) in production at scale.

• Experience defining schema migration strategies for high-velocity production environments with zero-downtime requirements.

• Experience with multi-tenant data architectures: customer data isolation, row-level security, and data residency concerns.

• Strong understanding of database performance: query optimization, indexing strategies, EXPLAIN analysis, and connection pooling.

Team Building & Engineering Culture

• Experience building or significantly growing an engineering team — including hiring, onboarding, and establishing engineering norms tailored for data-intensive systems.

• Proven ability to define and instill engineering culture: rigorous schema review, data integrity standards, operational runbooks, and oncall rotation.

• Drives high-impact architecture decisions rigorously — requires design documents, runs structured reviews, builds consensus across platform teams.

• Able to partner effectively with a Principal Engineer and leverage their technical leadership without diminishing team ownership.

Technical Expertise

• Proficient in Go, Python, or SQL (deep expertise).

• Production experience with PostgreSQL at scale: partitioning, logical replication, pg_bouncer/pgpool, read replicas.

• Experience with AWS data services: RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, or equivalent.

• Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) or time-series stores (TimescaleDB, InfluxDB) is a strong plus.

• Kubernetes and containerized database operations — stateful workload management.

Nice to Haves