Senior Director, Engineering, Precision Defense

Get to Know Us Horizon3 http://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 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 exper