Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud 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.

What You’ll Do

We are looking for an engineering leader to lead Horizon3’s infrastructure platform team. Our platform team is building capabilities for product development teams to be able to rapidly launch new product features, by providing self-service environments and infrastructure. This leader will also be chartered to establish a Site Reliability function to define and drive investments in operational excellence to ensure Horizon3’s product and service offerings meet customer and business expectations.

You will:

Enable Feature Development Teams

• Lead software engineering teams providing infrastructure-as-code to manage cloud infrastructure. Provide high quality IaC components and frameworks to support application development teams to leverage and extend to self-service their infrastructure provisioning.

• Establish governance and mechanisms for application development teams to self-service infrastructure provisioning, while providing for best practices and controls.

• Provide documentation, training, and support to ensure feature dev teams are leveraging self-service capabilities.

Establish an SRE function.

• Hire experienced site reliability staff, and a line manager to grow and oversee the SRE team.

• Professionalize incident management. Define and document incident processes and practices for your SRE team and for the application feature teams. Make tool and vendor decisions to support processes.

• Drive incident professionalism across the engineering organization through training and process adoption.

Drive Engineering Excellence in Platform Engineering

• Establish design-before-build discipline. Facilitate lightweight design documents, architectural decision records, and working group reviews. Outline operational lifecycles, “Day 2” concerns, and developer experience as part of infrastructure architecture decisions.

• Use design reviews, code reviews, and blameless retrospectives to drive a culture of quality and excellence in engineering.

People Leadership and Project Management

• Balance providing developer support while also executing on a roadmap of infrastructure engineering initiatives. Establish intake, allocate resources, provide visibility into backlogs to stakeholders, and manage prioritization against capacity.

• Directly manage a growing team of infrastructure engineers. Hire and develop line managers and staff / principal engineers. Ensure a strong bench of technical and leadership talent in your group. As a Manager, you will be responsible for:

  • Recruiting and onboarding talented individuals to support our organizational goals

  • Mentoring, coaching, equipping, and developing your team

  • Recognizing and retaining high performers

  • Leading horizontally with peer Management & Senior Leaders

What You’ll Bring (Qualifications)

Technical Leadership

• Demonstrated experience leading teams operating SaaS service infrastructure.

• Deep hands-on experience deploying and operating production infrastructure on public cloud platforms (AWS strongly preferred; Azure and GCP familiarity a plus).

• Strong command of Infrastructure as Code, including Terraform; experience with Crossplane and GitOps patterns strongly preferred.

• Experience managing production Kubernetes environments at scale.

• Solid understanding of security best practices including zero trust architecture, secrets management, identity and access management, and software supply chain security.

• Experience building and operating self-service infrastructure platforms that enable application development teams, while balancing self-service and developer productivity with maintainability and security.

Site Reliability and Operations

• Experience leading or building SRE functions, including incident management processes, on-call programs, SLO/SLA definition, and operational runbooks.

• Deep hands on experience with observability: application performance management, logs and traces, and golden signals and service-specific metrics.

Engineering Culture and Process

• Expert in leading infrastructure teams to translate business and product requirements into technical requirements and engineering deliverables. Demonstrated ability to drive a design-before-build engineering culture and capture operational lifecycle and impact on dependent teams into infrastructure architecture decisions.

• Experience in design practices like architecture decision records or RFCs in the infrastructure or platform engineering context.

• Proven track record of driving engineering rigor through coaching, design reviews, and feedback. Track record of growing engineers from strong individual contributors to system-level thinkers.

Leadership and People Management

• Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain high-performing engineers and engineering managers in remote or distributed environments.

• Proven skills in managing a backlog of strategic roadmap initiatives and a competing stream of developer support and operational requests against capacity constraints.

• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences.

• Proven ability to to build, scale, and retain high performing engineering teams in remote or distributed environments.

Occasional Business Travel Required

This position is remote, but 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: $260,000 - $280,000. 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 and benefits.

Perks of Horizon3.ai

• 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

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