Role description
Engineering Manager, Internal Attack
Horizon3.aiGet 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.
An Overview
This is the opportunity to lead the team that innovates on and maintains NodeZero's core internal attack capabilities. Internal pentesting is NodeZero's flagship capability and a core part of the growing Horizon3 platform. As Engineering Manager for Internal Attack Engineering, you'll lead an elite group of offensive engineers, with backgrounds in U.S. intelligence, special operations, and top consulting firms, who own that capability end to end: Active Directory, Linux and Unix hosts, databases, network infrastructure, and the other services attackers find inside enterprise networks.
The team spans career-level engineers through Staff and Principal, and its work is to research modern internal tradecraft and turn it into production-safe attacks that run autonomously across the largest enterprise networks in the world. Your job is to keep NodeZero ahead of hardening customer environments and fast-moving tradecraft by building the team, setting its direction, and making sure what it ships is safe to run in production.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You don't need to be the strongest operator on the team, but you need to be credible in design and code reviews, able to judge whether an attack is safe to run against a customer's production network, and able to explain an attack path to an engineer, a product manager, or a customer.
This is not consulting or manual pentesting. The team builds software that turns cutting-edge, often manual techniques into safe, reliable, repeatable attacks.
What You’ll Do
Leadership & Team Development
Lead, coach, and grow a team of Attack Engineers and backend engineers focused on internal network attacks, from Active Directory to Linux hosts, databases, and network infrastructure.
Own hiring for the team: shape the open roles, run interview loops, and close strong offensive and backend engineers in a competitive market.
Set clear expectations by level, give direct and timely feedback, run 1:1s and performance reviews, and build growth plans that move engineers to the next level.
Develop technical leaders on the team, including Staff and Principal engineers, so that domain expertise and review ownership are shared rather than held by one person.
Be accountable for the performance and quality of the team's work and for keeping it aligned with Product and Engineering goals.
Internal Attack Strategy & Execution
Define the team's strategy and roadmap for internal and AD attack coverage, tied to department goals, real customer environments, and emerging tradecraft.
Drive coverage for modern, hardened environments: attacks that still succeed under NTLM deprecation, enforced SMB and LDAP signing, Kerberos-only authentication, Protected Users, and tiered administration.
Guide work across the internal attack chain: credential access, Kerberos and delegation abuse, NTLM coercion and relay, AD Certificate Services, SCCM and other management planes, ACL and GPO abuse, lateral movement, and hybrid identity pivots into Entra ID.
Guide coverage beyond Active Directory: Linux and Unix hosts (SSH, NFS), databases (MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, Elasticsearch), and network infrastructure and embedded devices (SNMP, Cisco, Juniper, printers, IP cameras).
Own the discovery foundation the rest of the attack chain depends on: host discovery, service and OS fingerprinting, and credential and secrets discovery across hosts and file shares, at the scale of networks with hundreds of thousands of addresses.
Push the team to build AI agents where they make NodeZero better at internal attacks.
Own the team's production-safety standards, including account lockout safety and customer account exclusions, safe handling of fragile network devices and production databases, artifact cleanup, and safe defaults for any action that changes a customer system.
Set engineering standards for code review, testing, lab-based regression testing, and observability so attack content stays reliable as NodeZero scales.
Run execution: break the roadmap into scoped work, balance new coverage against reliability fixes and customer escalations, and deliver on commitments.
Product & Cross-Functional Partnership
Partner with Product to turn customer feedback, field findings, and threat intelligence into prioritized roadmap input, including in areas without a dedicated PM.
Direct the team's backend work on NodeZero's attack-path graph and data model so new identity, privilege-escalation, and lateral-movement paths show up correctly in customer results, and coordinate with Data Platform, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to land the cross-team changes this depends on.
Partner with peer Attack Engineering teams on shared infrastructure, cross-domain attack paths, and consistent engineering standards.
Customer & External Impact
Own the team's on-call rotation and serve as the escalation point for internal-attack customer issues: drive triage and root cause, turn recurring issues into durable fixes, and communicate exploitability, impact, and remediation clearly.
Support customer briefings, go-to-market enablement, and external research such as blog posts and conference talks.
What You’ll Bring
2+ years managing engineers on an offensive security, red team, or attack engineering team, including hiring, performance management, and career development.
8+ years of combined offensive security and software engineering experience, with significant hands-on time attacking Active Directory and internal enterprise networks.
Working command of current AD tradecraft (Kerberos attacks and delegation, NTLM coercion and relay, AD Certificate Services abuse, ACL and GPO abuse, lateral movement) and how it changes in hardened environments.
Hands-on experience with internal attacks beyond Active Directory: Linux and Unix privilege escalation and lateral movement, database exploitation, and attacks on network services and devices.
Software engineering fluency: comfortable reading and reviewing production Python, and working in Git, merge request, CI/CD, and product development workflows.
Experience turning offensive findings or manual techniques into product capabilities, automated tooling, or repeatable services.
Sound judgment about operational safety when running offensive techniques against production customer environments.
A record of building teams people want to join and stay on: clear expectations, direct feedback, and engineers who grew under your leadership.
Strong written and verbal communication with engineers, product partners, executives, and customers.
Comfort setting direction in ambiguous situations without a fully defined roadmap.
What Sets You Apart
Experience leading teams that build autonomous pentesting, breach and attack simulation, or other offensive security products.
Experience with SCCM, Windows Admin Center, and hybrid identity attacks (Entra Connect, primary refresh tokens, seamless SSO).
Experience scaling network discovery and scanning (nmap, masscan, nuclei) across very large enterprise networks.
Experience building LLM-powered agents or applying AI to offensive security or asset discovery workflows.
Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j) and attack-path analysis.
OSCP, OSEP, CRTO, or equivalent offensive certifications.
Public contributions to the field: open-source tools, technical blog posts, conference talks, or published CVEs.
Experience managing a fully remote engineering team.
Travel Required
We are a fully remote company, and this job may require up to 10% of travel to be successful.
Compensation and Values
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: $238,000 - $280,000 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.
Perks of Horizon3
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.
You Belong Here
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, hair length 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.
Other Duties
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.
Application Note
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.