Senior Engineering Manager, Core Platform

Get to Know Us

Horizon3.ai 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.

As a remote first company, we require minimum 25Mbps consumer grade broadband connection.

What You'll Do

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Core Platform organization — a high-impact team that underpins NodeZero’s reliability, scalability, and core backend systems.

This is a technical leadership role focused on driving excellence in backend infrastructure, data pipelines, observability, and API performance. The Platform Stability team’s customers are other Horizon3.ai engineering teams, and your mission is to ensure the foundation they build on is fast, resilient, and scalable.

You’ll own and accelerate our platform architecture and infrastructure, enabling engineering teams and on-call responders to deliver, operate, and recover quickly as we scale securely and sustainably.

This is an ideal opportunity for someone who loves solving great data and scalability problems — a highly technical manager who has moved beyond hands-on coding into leadership, but still brings a deep understanding of distributed systems and platform engineering.

What You’ll Bring

• Proven experience leading highly technical backend or platform engineering teams — ideally within a SaaS, cybersecurity, or cloud-scale environment.

• Deep understanding of scalable backend architecture, database optimization, and distributed systems.

• Experience with data pipelines and ETL systems.

• Experience with observability tooling and platform monitoring

• Strong grasp of cloud infrastructure concepts (AWS, GCP, Azure), DevOps, and resilience engineering principles.

• Demonstrated success building and managing teams that support core platform reliability and internal developer platforms.

• Ability to balance technical depth with strategic foresight — looking ahead to align infrastructure investments with business priorities.

• Excellent communicator and collaborator, comfortable working cross-functionally and aligning diverse stakeholders.

• Comfortable operating without a dedicated product manager — able to help define direction, set technical priorities, and contribute to roadmapping.

• Background in software engineering, computer science, or related technical field; Bachelor’s or Master’s degree preferred.

Required Tech Stack Experience

• Strong background in backend engineering and/or platform engineering, with deep experience in designing, scaling, and maintaining distributed systems.

• Expertise in at least one object-oriented programming language (Python strongly preferred; open to Go, Java, C++, or similar).

• Familiarity with ETL pipelines, data flow orchestration, and database performance optimization (PostgreSQL, Neo4j, or equivalent).

• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure and services (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including networking, compute, and storage fundamentals.

• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code and deployment concepts (e.g., Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD tooling).

• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.).

• Understanding of security and reliability best practices, especially in a multi-tenant SaaS or cybersecurity environment.

• Knowledge of Linux-based systems (Ubuntu, Kali, etc.) and modern