Engineering Manager, Firewall Defense

Horizon3

10d•$225,000 - $265,000

About The Position

Horizon3 is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead its Firewall validation, effectiveness, and tuning team. The team turns insights from NodeZero's production-safe autonomous penetration tests into defensive action for customers. The manager will guide a team with diverse skill sets and work cadences, build an environment where those differences complement one another, and own hiring, employee growth, and team practices as the group scales. This is a highly technical leadership role for someone who has moved beyond hands-on coding but can still evaluate designs, challenge estimates, and identify when a team is blocked. The manager will partner with a Staff-level Technical Lead who owns architecture, Product on roadmap and sequencing, and engineering leaders across the organization. The role includes translating ambiguous goals into sequenced, deliverable work; actively managing scope; and establishing operational practices for design reviews, releases, on-call, and incident response. Horizon3 is a fast-growing cybersecurity company that offers remote and hybrid work models depending on role and location. Its NodeZero platform performs autonomous penetration tests and other assessment operations across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid-cloud environments. The company describes its culture as collaborative, respectful, inclusive, and focused on ownership and results.

Requirements

Familiarity with firewall or network security sufficient to partner effectively with domain experts.
Proven experience leading highly technical backend or platform engineering teams.
Track record delivering products under a fixed date when requirements were ambiguous and scope needed active management.
Strong dependency and stakeholder management across multiple engineering teams, including surfacing risks and tradeoffs early and in writing.
Understanding of security and reliability best practices in multi-tenant SaaS.
Experience partnering with a staff-level technical lead and a clear understanding of the boundary between management and technical ownership.
Ability to maintain a quality or safety bar under schedule pressure and escalate scope tradeoffs.
Ability to evaluate designs, challenge estimates, and recognize when a team is stuck.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading teams in a SaaS, cybersecurity, or cloud-scale environment.
Working familiarity with enterprise firewall platforms such as Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Cisco, or Check Point, and ability to evaluate security, delivery, and operational tradeoffs.
Hands-on enterprise firewall platform or integration experience.
Familiarity with agentic or LLM-backed systems in production and a realistic view of how they fail.
Background in security operations, detection engineering, or offensive security.
Experience leading a platform team whose customers were other internal engineering teams.
Exposure to event-driven architectures or streaming platforms such as Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, or Flink.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and grow backend engineers and security practitioners with deep firewall and defensive expertise, providing clear career paths.
Help translate firewall workflows into buildable requirements and usable product capabilities.
Partner with a Staff-level Technical Lead who owns architecture, and with Product on roadmap and sequencing.
Translate ambiguous goals into sequenced, deliverable work and actively manage scope.
Stay technically engaged to challenge assumptions and unblock the team while delivering outcomes through engineers rather than serving as the primary implementer.
Establish operational discipline, including design review, release practices, on-call, and incident response.
Own hiring, team growth, and how the team works together as it scales.
Manage dependencies and stakeholders across engineering teams, surfacing risks and tradeoffs early and in writing.
Maintain quality and safety standards under schedule pressure, escalating scope tradeoffs rather than absorbing them.