Senior Manager, Database Platform

Horizon3

2d•$242,250 - $275,000•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience leading teams that design, scale, and operate relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and hybrid data stores (graph, time-series, or document) in production at scale.
Experience defining schema migration strategies for high-velocity production environments with zero-downtime requirements.
Experience with multi-tenant data architectures: customer data isolation, row-level security, and data residency concerns.
Strong understanding of database performance: query optimization, indexing strategies, EXPLAIN analysis, and connection pooling.
Experience building or significantly growing an engineering team — including hiring, onboarding, and establishing engineering norms tailored for data-intensive systems.
Proven ability to define and instill engineering culture: rigorous schema review, data integrity standards, operational runbooks, and oncall rotation.
Drives high-impact architecture decisions rigorously — requires design documents, runs structured reviews, builds consensus across platform teams.
Able to partner effectively with a Principal Engineer and leverage their technical leadership without diminishing team ownership.
Proficient in Go, Python, or SQL (deep expertise).
Production experience with PostgreSQL at scale: partitioning, logical replication, pg_bouncer/pgpool, read replicas.
Experience with AWS data services: RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, or equivalent.
Kubernetes and containerized database operations — stateful workload management.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, AWS Neptune) or time-series stores (TimescaleDB, InfluxDB) is a strong plus.
Background in cybersecurity data, threat intelligence feeds, or vulnerability databases.
Experience with data platform compliance: SOC 2, FedRAMP, or GDPR/CCPA data handling requirements.
Familiarity with analytical query patterns: BI tooling, OLAP workloads, or customer-facing analytics.
Experience operating databases in multi-region or active-active configurations.

Responsibilities

Lead the Database Platform team — the engineering team responsible for the data infrastructure that underpins every NodeZero pentest, finding, and report.
Own the design, operation, and reliability of our core data layer — currently PostgreSQL as the primary store and Neo4j for the asset graph, with time-series and analytical stores on the roadmap as NodeZero's data volume and use cases grow.
Lead a team of ~8 engineers including a Principal Engineer, and build this team from a strong foundation into a fully staffed, world-class data platform organization.
Hire, mentor, and grow the Database Platform team to full capacity.
Establish database engineering norms and a culture of ownership for engineers who share responsibility for the most critical data layer in our stack.
Define the technical direction for NodeZero's data platform — schema design standards, query patterns, migration strategies, and scalability principles.
Own SLOs for database availability, query latency, and data integrity across production environments.
Drive oncall maturity and runbook quality.
Establish schema review processes and data modeling standards.
Ensure NodeZero's data model evolves cleanly as new pentest capabilities ship.
Collaborate with Data Ingestion, Security Research, and API Platform teams to align on data contracts, API design, and pipeline dependencies.
Act as a Product Owner: Translate data platform needs from Security Research and Product into a clear, prioritized engineering roadmap.