Director of Engineering, Webapp & AI Attack

Horizon3

10d•$290,000 - $340,000•Remote

About The Position

The Director of Engineering for Webapp and AI Attack sets direction and leads the teams that turn web application and AI offensive security expertise into dependable, customer-facing NodeZero capabilities. The role owns strategy, execution, and organizational health across the portfolio, partnering with engineering managers, technical leaders, Product, Platform, and customer-facing teams. The director guides capabilities from discovery and research through productization and ongoing operation. This includes improving how NodeZero maps and tests modern web applications and building responsible, repeatable ways to assess AI-enabled and agentic systems. It is a people and portfolio leadership role that requires enough technical depth to shape decisions and raise quality while enabling teams and technical leaders to own implementation. Horizon3 is a fast-growing, remote cybersecurity company. The role is remote-first and may require up to 15% travel. The base salary range is $290,000–$340,000, with the exact salary determined by location, qualifications, experience, and relevant skills. Full-time roles are eligible for an equity package in the form of stock options. Benefits include health, vision, and dental insurance for the employee and family, a flexible vacation policy, and generous parental leave.

Requirements

Significant experience leading software engineering teams that build customer-facing products, ideally in cybersecurity, security testing, or another technically complex SaaS domain.
Experience leading multiple teams and developing managers and senior technical leaders, with a track record of building accountable, high-performing organizations.
Demonstrated ability to set strategy and deliver across multiple teams, translating business and customer priorities into focused roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
Strong technical judgment in software architecture, automation, distributed systems, and production operations, with the ability to engage credibly with engineers and technical leaders.
Experience taking complex capabilities from early research or concept through reliable production delivery and ongoing improvement.
A customer-oriented product mindset and sound judgment balancing innovation, coverage, reliability, safety, delivery speed, and maintainability.
Ability to build effective partnerships across Engineering, Product, and customer-facing teams, resolve misalignment, and communicate decisions and risks clearly.
Demonstrated commitment to coaching, clear performance feedback, inclusive leadership, and healthy team culture.
Excellent written, verbal, and analytical communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical choices to varied audiences.
High degree of initiative, ownership, and accountability, and comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with ambiguity.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Familiarity with offensive security, web application penetration testing, vulnerability research, attack automation, or building security products.
Working knowledge of modern web application architecture, HTTP, authentication and session flows, APIs, browser automation, and challenges of testing real-world applications at scale.
Familiarity with AI/LLM and agentic-system security, including trust boundaries, tool-use risks, and approaches to evaluating AI-enabled systems.
Experience with cloud software and production platforms, and fluency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, TypeScript, Go, or a comparable language.
Understanding of engineering practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident response, and operational readiness.

Nice To Haves

Direct leadership experience across both web application security and AI/LLM security; deep expertise in one area paired with the ability to build strong technical leadership in the other is also valuable.
Experience with web crawling, spidering, browser automation, application discovery, or authentication technologies such as SSO, SAML, or OIDC.
Experience shipping AI/LLM security capabilities, building agentic workflows, or applying frameworks such as OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications or MITRE ATLAS.
Contributions to security research, open-source tooling, technical publications, conference talks, or other work that advances the field.
Experience with cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP; graph or relational databases such as Neo4j or PostgreSQL; or offensive security certifications such as OSCP, OSEP, or OSWE.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop the Webapp and AI Attack engineering teams, setting clear ownership, goals, and expectations across the portfolio.
Define a coherent strategy and roadmap connecting customer needs, product priorities, offensive research, and durable engineering investments.
Build an effective leadership structure as the organization grows; hire, coach, and develop engineering managers, technical leaders, and senior individual contributors.
Set operating mechanisms that make outcomes, progress, capacity, quality, dependencies, and risks visible without adding unnecessary process.
Own organizational health and performance, including talent planning, career development, timely feedback, accountability, and succession planning.
Foster an inclusive, psychologically safe environment where teams can raise risks, learn from failures, and do their best work.
Set direction for NodeZero’s web application attack portfolio, including application discovery, crawling and browser automation, authentication and session handling, attack coverage, and feedback between discovery and testing.
Ensure the platform can reliably map pages, forms, APIs, parameters, and authentication surfaces across modern applications, including JavaScript-heavy single-page applications and complex user flows.
Partner with technical leaders to improve attack coverage, framework breadth, and the quality of application context available to downstream testing.
Establish benchmarks, regression practices, and production signals to reveal coverage gaps and prevent quality from degrading as applications and frameworks evolve.
Use customer feedback, production behavior, and missed opportunities to prioritize improvements and connect discovery and testing to customer outcomes.
Set strategy for turning AI/LLM and agentic-system security research into safe, reliable, repeatable NodeZero attack capabilities.
Guide assessment of AI applications and infrastructure, including trust boundaries, permissions, tool use, data sources, model-serving and retrieval architectures, and enterprise deployment patterns.
Help teams evaluate and productize attack classes such as prompt injection, unsafe tool use, and AI supply-chain or deployment risks, with appropriate safeguards and clear customer value.
Establish quality standards for testing, evaluation, reliability, observability, cost management, and operational readiness in AI-powered offensive workflows.
Track the evolving AI security landscape and help distinguish durable customer needs from short-lived trends.
Partner with Product and leaders across Engineering, Platform, and customer-facing functions to translate ambiguous opportunities into sequenced plans with explicit outcomes and ownership.
Make and communicate tradeoffs across customer impact, speed, coverage, reliability, safety, cost, and long-term maintainability.
Drive complex, cross-team initiatives from planning through production, identifying dependencies and risks early and aligning stakeholders on decisions and changes.
Maintain sufficient technical depth to evaluate architecture, system health, and engineering quality while partnering with senior individual contributors rather than becoming a day-to-day decision bottleneck.
Ensure strong engineering practices across design, implementation, testing, release, monitoring, incident response, and learning from production issues.
Use customer feedback and product and engineering signals to assess results and continuously improve organizational delivery.