Senior Attack Engineer, Kubernetes

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.   About The Role We’re looking for a senior offensive security engineer to lead the development of Kubernetes attack capabilities in NodeZero. You’ll research how attackers move from a compromised workload or identity through and beyond a cluster, and turn that research into safe, repeatable capabilities. You’ll own complex work from attack research and technical design through integration and customer-facing proof, while helping set the direction for Kubernetes coverage across cloud and self-managed environments. This is not a maintenance role. You'll serve as the technical lead helping define Horizon3 http://Horizon3.ai's Kubernetes offensive security strategy and will have a first-hand influence on how Kubernetes attacks are integrated into the platform. What You’ll Do - Lead offensive security research into Kubernetes clusters, workloads, identities, configurations, and cloud-connected environments. - Design and build production-quality Python attack capabilities that model realistic attacker perspectives, including an assumed-breach foothold in a pod or workload. - Develop and validate attack paths involving Kubernetes RBAC, service accounts and credentials, workloads and pods, secrets, cluster and node boundaries, network reachability, and integrations with cloud identities and managed Kubernetes services. - Assess Kubernetes security weaknesses and determine whether they create meaningful, provable impact; build safe validation and negative testing into the capability. - Own technical planning for substantial Kubernetes initiatives: identify coverage gaps, prioritize research, make design trade-offs, and coordinate delivery with Product, platform, and engineering partners. - Integrate attack content into NodeZero’s execution and results flows so customers receive reliable evidence and clear explanations of the paths found. - Review code and designs, establish quality expectations, mentor teammates, and share Kubernetes offensive-security expertise across the team. - Document methodologies, assumptions, limitations, and test approaches; contribute to internal and external technical enablement where appropriate. What You’ll Bring - Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes security and offensive testing of containerized environments. - Expert level understanding of Kubernetes architecture and identity and authorization controls, especially RBAC, service accounts, workloads, and cluster boundaries. - Strong Python engineering skills and experience productizing security research into reliable automation. - Experience with pen